Sneaking in at the last minute and up against some very stiff competition from the luminaries in the industry, those being Kevin Crawford and Johnstone Metzger, and those products being Atlas of the Latter Earth and Only Monsters Here, Wightchester rises above the rest by doing something I wasn't expecting. Several things really but one is a miracle -
It made me reconsider Mork Borg. Maybe even like it. Well, not so much it as a build of it.
Wightchester is tri-statted for Grimm's own Grimdark, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and Mork Borg. Each of these games has problems BUT Wightchester solves only one of them - and does so in such a way as to make it indispensable to that system. In an effort to not bury the lead: Wightchester is the other half of the Mork Borg rules that are missing. Well, most of it. This was a welcome surprise but not what made me want to buy it. Grimm sold it to me on one of his videos talking about it.
This is what made me want to buy it. the tagline was - you can pick this book up and start playing in Wightchester without reading the book beforehand. I've not seen this sort of thing before, and if I have it was not on the scale of Wightchester. It's not 100% true unless you intrinsically know one of the three systems it's statted for. LotFP stats are pretty dodgy (especially HD/HPs), but the nuances of that system require a lot of study to understand (and access to a very out-of-print Referee book) while Mork Borg... doesn't. Mork Borg is cartoonishly simple. So much so that you can pick up and start playing without having read the core book...
Ergo, the style of play Wightchester was built for is part and parcel of Mork Borg, this is primarily a Mork Borg supplement, arguably it's what Mork Borg was missing. Wightchester needs about 2 pages and some reorganization to supplant Mork Borg and not actually require a game system at all. I would keep pages 18-441 virtually unchanged, but I would take everything before and after that would change. The bestiary, 456-495 - 39 pages could probably be cut to about 6 pages if I had to guess if you deleted all the unnecessary stats. We'd probably only get about a page for pruning out unnecessary bits of the first 17 pages, but there's no guarantee that wouldn't be just gaps of white here and there. 442-455 (13 pages) would also better be set before the bulk of Wightchester, the entire bookwould be properly streamlined to where you wouldn't need any other products to run the game. I am assuming Grimm thought of this and decided against it for marketability sake (the dreaded dollar ruining artistic decisions once again).
The book has issues as well. It only references each index entry to one page. For Angel Square, this is a tiny blurb on page 19 instead of the actual entry for the adventure area on page 180. This is just one example. Another massive problem is a distinct hatred of reference numbers in the text itself - open to a random page and you'll be anywhere in the city, with no compass and likely it'll take some page flips to figure out where it is. From there it'll take cross referencing a map affixed to a page with entries on another page to figure it out. But it gets better. Some stuff isn't even listed on the map. The buildings are there, but there's no reference at all in the text. I flipped to Crown Avenue 162. There are three houses on either side of the avenue. Listed in the text as house 1-6. Not listed on the map at all.
In spite of these issues, as king of the OSR I proclaim this Product of the Year 2022.
