First, using public domain art from The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel was ... a choice. Second, I'm happy to say there is a Tarantula Hawk Wasp in the bestiary. And it's second favorite egg incubator - the Dire Tarantula.

The Lavender Hack was designed to play OSR adventure modules in a more PBTA-ish way, and to have nautical rules for exploration around the other, ignored, islands in The Dark of Hot Springs Island. There is a huge list of inspiration, but The Black Hack and Ironsworn are obvious. There are designer notes throughout explaining design choices and inspiration for specific mechanics. No settings here - the entire book is mechanics, capped with a dozen, or so, pages of bestiary.

The game is very crunchy - mechanics for everything - but they all feed back into the narrative - not the play-your-character-sheet that you tend to get with a lot of crunch. Strict time-tracking with worksheets and flow-charts to help. Three classes: The Strong, the Deft and the Wise. They map as you'd expect, except the first two are a bit more defense and offense-focused, respectively. The game has heavy use of shared usage dies, including a Fellowship die that can lead to intra-company (read: party) friction, forced by the mechanics. You can really see the Ironsworn influence on die rolls - results are split into critical, strong success, weak success, miss and fumble - and initiative - it's more footing, as opposed to turn order.

Combat is fascinating. It's not spacially tactical - it's temporally tactical. The side with initiative has control over melee groups (called "Clashes") and the order of actions in a clash. Other than the first round, initiative is seized, not rolled. That means that, depending on rolls in a clash, the side with initiative may be choosing between a devastating hit and keeping initiative in the next round.

Fast travel (basically point-crawl) and exploration rules for different focuses. Rules for factions and for negotiating with them. Roles for exploring and for ship-based combat. Mechanics for a scout encountering NPCs. Downtime and hometown progression that feed back into the game's economy. Intelligent artifacts that have goals and a usage die for their patience with their wielder achieving those goals.

It's extremely comprehensive, but it's not fiddly. It would be tough to run the first few times, because there is so much, but everything makes sense for that subsystem - there is nothing subtle that you'd forget when running - it's just that you'd need to flip to the relevant section for that specific mechanical subsystem.

I really like what I see, and would love to run or play it.