In June 2022 we presented two offers – one new, one revived – featuring English-language .PDF ebooks for the Brancalonia Spaghetti Fantasy campaign setting from Acheron Games (Milan, Italy) for D&D Fifth Edition and compatible systems. The revived November 2024 Brancalonia Bundle once again presented the main campaign book and early supplements. The all-new companion offer, Brancalonia Bounty, sent Knaves on new Jobs across the Bounty Kingdom, a fantastic medieval Italy full of dangerous wonders.
Set in a topsy-turvy version of medieval Italy (the title alludes to a 1966 Italian comedy film, L’armata Brancaleone), this unheroic, picaresque, and roguish world draws on Italian culture and pop-culture from Umberto Eco to Corto Maltese – Renaissance epics and Italo Calvino – The Princess Bride, Pinocchio, and a hundred more. Brancalonia is a brawly low-fantasy land of legendary knights and skilled treasure-hunters – but you’re not them. You’re Knaves: lowlife swindlers, slobs, and scoundrels who get pulled out of prison to fix things after those heroes mess up. You might take Jobs from talking mice, omnipotent fairies, devils from Inferno, and foul-mouthed marionettes. If you climb the ranks of your free company, you can hope to pull off a heist that will set you up for life. What could possibly go wrong?
1. BRANCALONIA [from Nov 2024]
This revived November 2024 Brancalonia Bundle once again had the core campaign book and early supplements – everything you need (well, aside from the D&D 5E rulebooks) to run light-hearted, low-magic adventures for easygoing Knaves who may not prevent calamity but will definitely drink good wine beforehand. Pay just US$12.95 to get all four English-language titles in this revived offer’s Brancalonia Collection (retail value $53) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Brancalonia Spaghetti Fantasy Setting Book and three supplements: the Macaronicon, The Empire Whacks Back, and Jinx’s Almanack. We also include a pay-what-you-want collection of fun Archon Games newsletters, the Digital Lasagna MegaBundle.
2. BRANCALONIA BOUNTY [all-new]
This new Brancalonia Bounty companion offer added recent Brancalonia supplements funded in a September 2023 Kickstarter campaign. Let your gobbolin Saucerer cultists, vitruvian golems, necromantic bingyonder wizards of Zombingo, tarantulit barbarians, and Yokel Agitators study the Supreme Beatings compendium of the Brawly Demiurges to learn secret techniques like Flying Headbutt, Slapberry Jam, and the Four-Hundred Buttkicks. Then send these Knaves on a rollercoaster journey from the Apulian countryside full of dancing spider-witches to the Strait of Messina, dominated by the mythological Scylla and Charybdis – from the snow-capped Dolomites infested with mule-demons to the Grand Hostel of the Knights of Malt in Vaticin City. Watch out for the Colombre shark (which, once it has chosen its prey, chases it for its entire life) and the Pasta Mater Tenebrarum, culinary goddess and mistress of the Dark Kitchen.
Through fairy tale and grimdark, folk horror and sword-and-sorcery, literary and pop, Brancalonia keeps reminding us, over and over, of the hundreds of ways Italy figures in our mental landscape. “Oh yeah – Pinocchio! Casanova! Vesuvius! Polenta!”
There were three complete Brancalonia supplements in this offer’s Bounty Collection (retail value $65), including the Bounty Kingdom Gazetteer, the Spaghetti Fantasy Bestiary, and the adventure collection Furious Lands and Other Dirty Jobs.
