Beyond the Pale is a fantastic moral adventure
Fantastic as in great and also as in magical.
(Contains minor spoilers.)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The famous maggid (or preacher) of Dubno, Jacob Krantz, was once asked why he spoke in parables. Obviously, he replied in the form of a parable. Once upon a time, he said, Truth was walking in the streets, butt naked. People didn’t like this. They averted their gaze. They ducked into alleyways. They avoided him at all costs. But Truth doesn’t understand what’s happening. That is, until he meets Parable walking down the same streets, decked in the finest fashions — drippy, as the kids would say. When Parable hears Truth’s problems, he lends him some of the clothes off his back, and suddenly Truth isn’t a pariah anymore. People actually like to see Truth walking down the street, even come say hello and welcome him into their homes. Since then, the story goes, Truth and Parable were inseparable friends.
Beyond the Pale, by Yochai Gal and Lost Pages, isn’t a parable. It is, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy adventure module. It contains one forest, two dungeons, many quests, and lots of monsters. And yet there is something parable-esque about it.
The adventure takes place in an alternate version of a real historical place: The Pale of Settlement. This was where, around the 19th century, the Russian Empire forced Jews to settle by making residency anywhere else illegal. Strange things are occurring in Kest, a shtetl within the Pale settled by Jews fleeing persecution about 30 years before the time of the story. Kest is the heart of the adventure, and it is a beautifully rendered place full of character (and some real characters). It's a humble logging town where most of the residents work for the Holtz company chopping wood from the Blue Forest. It's not a company town — at least not yet. To put it simply, Kest is on the verge of transformation… or possibly, total annihilation.
