Fever Swamp has some interesting ideas, but it is reality an art project disguised as a functional game supplement. It has the appearance of a hex crawl, but closer examination reveals it's exceptionally thin on the ground. All but two or three hexes are nothing more than encounters. The few hexes that are more are either sketches waiting to be filled in by a competent GM who doesn't value his own time, or rely on zany energy to carry them, rather than sensible design.

The tables and "classes" have some originality, but I would be severely cautious about adding them as more than NPCs.

The bestiary has one or two good entries, but like the rest of the piece a lot to appear as more than it is. The creepy, evocative art is revealed to be rather empty of sensible mechanics or through-lines to bring it home.

Fever Swamp is short. I don't recommend it as more than an art book or to steal one or two elements for a better setting. Get it at 6 dollars if you must, not 16. I had read reviews and watched Youtube flip-throughs before buying, but was still surprised at the brevity other deficits. It's a book that does a lot to appear as more than it is.

This is a fantastic supplement that leaves plenty of room for development and is fertile ground for building things out as you like them. Gearing's humor cuts through the bog like a sharp breath of fresh air. I wrote more thoughts on this one here: https://sky-spire.bearblog.dev/review-19-fever-swamp/

For a longer, more coherent version of the little review below, pls visit my review blog!

Love this creepy crawl so much that I also bought the hard-back! This thing is jam packed with swampy goodness creepy denizens, dangerous locales, and unique creatures. It's small but potent, with every bit of page space used for the quite condensed sandbox (swampbox?). Even the front and back inside cover are, respectively, a hex map with key and a quite nasty random swamp diseases table. It's ostensibly a low-level area, but low level characters will want to be very cautious and may spend a decent amount of time hiding or running away. I could see it being a quite challenging mid level adventure with only a little extra GM prep time, and the swamp itself and the many tables in it could be endlessly reused. I'm going to use this for one little excursion Lankhmar based party is going to make into the Great Salt Marsh!

Among my favourite setting books, I love its simplicity, usability & originality. The art and monsters are very cool

Five dollars, and you'll get a living, writhing, steaming swamp, filled with pain and disease, and creatures that leak their way onto your gaming table, and into the minds of your players. It's so very very worth it.

It's extremely functional. I bought a copy at lunchtime, and was running a game almost immediately afterwards. It communicates its tone with profound and useful brevity. It's eloquent, but never outstays its welcome with prose. The illustrations are all beautiful, and serve that same unrelenting tone of oppressive heat and the stench of death.

If you're looking for somewhere to kill a few players of your favourite OSR experience in an afternoon, then Fever Swamp is the place to go.