Review: Black Leopard, Red Wolf & Dirge of Urazya

When it was first announced, Black Leopard, Red Wolf was billed an “African Game of Thrones”. The go-to byline for any fantasy series with epic scale promising grit, violence, and realpolitik in contrast to the “pastoral” popular perception of mainstream fantasy. A wrongheaded comparison on multiple levels that we don’t have time or space for today (catch me on the Discord). That sales pitch missed the mark even though it drummed up interest in Black Leopard, Red Wolf prior to release. What arrived was far stranger, denser, wondrous, and more surreal than Game of Thrones and most fantasy novels on the shelf.
What starts as a straightforward testimony from a simple spoken narrator paints a lurid picture of the Kingdoms, their struggles, and the violence in all the spaces in between. Nested narratives lead to a Rashomon labyrinth of perspectives and conflicting account. Planting and watering seeds of doubt regarding Tracker, the protagonist, and his veracity even though he says from the beginning: “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.”

Know this: Tracker has a dog’s nose and won’t lead you astray.

Dirge of Urazya is a zine by Jack Shear of Dolorous Exhumation Press and Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque fame. After making a splash in the RPG scene with his 13 Flavors of Fear, Jack has built a reputation for the lurid, the blasphemous, and the weird with each subsequent release from demonic Western to Gothic blood opera. While most of his work runs 100+ pages, Dirge of Urazya is on the opposite end at a sleek 24 and I love its brevity.

While Umberwell details an Industrial urban hellscape rich with grime, Dirge offers a lean set of prompts so your whole group can create the Gothic, Western, post-apocalyptic, science fantasy world promised by Netflix’ Castlevania (which I swear is Warren Ellis’ Vampire Hunter D fanfiction) and Into The Badlands (Danny Wu’s post-apocalypse wuxia western also available on Netflix). The PDF is only $4.00 (currently on sale for $2.68) and offers far more in value. I recommend pretty much everything he’s written, Jack’s name on a title is a stamp of quality and weirdness you shouldn’t overlook.

Jack provided a good overview of Dirge's development and assembly here and I'll similarly follow that roadmap with my own creative projects in the future.