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Intended to be the first part of a series that, so far as I can tell, never got any further than this, this is essentially a collection of 25 NPCs. They have no stats, although some are rated as above average for combat ability and the like. For many of them, you probably wouldn't need stats anyway, since they'll mainly serve as background flavour. Each typically has one or two paragraphs of description.
They are all of the kind that might be found in cheap taverns, whether because they're career criminals, outcasts of some kind, or just poor labourers. There's a good variety here, and plenty of ideas. Many of them could be used as NPCs in other contexts, although a tavern is as good a place as any to meet them. The book rounds out with a list of 20 plot ideas, some generic, and some tied to specific NPCs in the book.
A useful set of NPCs when you need to come up with some quickly.
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This, the last in the City Streets series to date, describes the business of a scribe and translator, a somewhat unusual service that PCs might nonetheless find themselves in need of. The artwork is unusually good in this one, which is 5 pages in length, and everything else is up to the usual standards. There isn't really any kind of dark secret going on here, although there are six suggested plot hooks that can make use of the business and the diverse range of apprentices that the owner has gathered together. All in all, a useful product that should fit in almost any fantasy city with little, if any, modification.
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One of the darker entries in the City Streets series, this describes a drug den and brothel with some rather unpleasant goings on. The owner is suitably unpleasant, without being over-the-top, and it's likely that, in most campaigns, he'll be a minor villain rather than a helpful NPC. The descriptions are atmospheric, the artwork isn't bad, and layout, writing, and hand-drawn maps are all good, as usual.
Obviously, the fact that the place deals in drugs, and that these are a major element in what's going on, may not make it suitable for all campaigns, but it's more alluded to than described in detail, and certainly isn't glamourised, so I have no problem with it. A few drugs are described in general terms; two of these are real-world medieval drugs, and three are fictional, but quite plausible, even for a low-magic campaign. It should be easy enough to drop into most fantasy cities without modification.
(As an aside, contra the previous reviewer, there's no mention of heroin in my copy. Perhaps it was edited out at some point).
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A description of a relatively generic dockside tavern, this 6-page booklet is nicely done and can easily be dropped into any city that actually has docks, whether they're on the coast or just a large river. There's good descriptions of the proprietors, who, while with less of a dark secret than in other instalments in the City Streets series, still have potential to generate stories. Seven are provided at the end of the booklet, and there's plenty of opportunity to expand on them in a number of weighs. The use of old copyright-free art, rather than low quality drawings, is an improvement over some other booklets in the series.
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This 6-page instalment of the City Streets series provides a herbalist/alchemist's shop that, as usual, has a bit more going on behind the scenes. The artwork isn't quite up to the standards of earlier booklets in the series, but otherwise, it's well written and laid out, with decent hand-drawn maps. The secret in this case is one that makes perfect sense, while being fairly unusual, although it's arguably one that's slightly harder than usual to work into a game.
The booklet includes a brief description of some of the potions that Siarl can make, but this isn't really a book of potions, and most are fairly mundane (healing potions, for instance). Nonetheless, it's all good flavour, and some are a little unusual. There are, as usual, a number of plot hooks provided at the end to fit the shop into your campaign - and it shouldn't be a problem doing so in most settings. One of them does seem to come a little of left-field, as I'm not entirely clear what the motivation of the NPC is, but it should be dramatic if you can find a way to fit it in.
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This is one of the longer offerings in the City Streets series, at nine pages. It describes a spa on the outskirts of town, and, since it relies on the presence of volcanic springs, might be harder than some others in the series to just put down in a random city. The quality of the writing, layout, and maps is about the same as usual, although one of the two pieces of artwork is pretty dreadful.
Although there is a theme to the location, it's perhaps less dramatic than for some of the others in the series, although certainly useful nonetheless. The booklet is longer than usual because of the large number of staff in the building, each of whom gets a short description. (And, it should be added, this is quite specifically a spa, not a brothel).
However, there is also an alternative version of the spa for use in higher magic or higher level campaigns. This is less developed than the main version, but the central theme is much the same, so a lot of the information in the main section will work for both versions. Each version of the spa also comes with five suggested plot hooks.
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Another top quality instalment from the City Street series, this one covers what is essentially a jewellers' shop. As always, it's well written and laid out, with a decent quality hand-drawn plan of the building. The shop itself, isn't so much the point of the 5-page booklet, which is really a description of its mysterious owner and what he is up to. It's this that provides the real interest, and the six suggested plot hooks at the end. All of this is generic enough that it will fit into any city that has at least some kind of wealthy elite and a criminal underclass - which is surely most of them.
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A 5 page booklet describing a bookshop run by an elderly wizard with somewhat suspect dealings with the rich and powerful. It's simple, well-written, and with a decent hand-drawn plan of the building. It should generally be quite useful, and easy to port into most settings. It includes some suggestions as to how the location could be used in adventures, and provides a real spark of interest, without obviously being over-powered.
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This is a large book, with over 200 pages, detailing a vast continent in a fairly typical D&D world. There is very little distinctive about the setting, with the only real theme being a battle between the followers of various members of an unusually large pantheon of deities. This particular book, however, doesn't elaborate too much on that, instead focussing on the geography and politics of the world. There are also three new races - monkey-people, bird-people, and cat-people - and some fairly standard prestige classes and feats. The book concludes with a bunch of house rules that confirm the feeling that this more a collection of campaign notes than a cohesive book.
Having said that, there is a lot of detail here, and if you're looking for a standard world without too many twists, this will at least save you a lot of work. Weather, geography, and earthquake risk are all covered for each region, and there's a full list of cities and towns. Much of this is quite good, but the tables of racial and class composition for the populations of the key cities is arguably overkill. Nor are the implications of the tables thought out; they're presumably just outputs from a calculator. Why, for example, are cities with multiple nobles of 15th level and up nonetheless ruled by aristocrats of only 6th level? Why does a city with a population of 1,900 apparently only have about 50 children in it? (I'm assuming here that the children are the ones without a character class or level listed - if not, who are they?)
There isn't a lot of variety, either. For a continent nearly twice the size of Asia, there's no real sense of cultural variation. Perhaps this is just detail that got left out in favour of class/level demographics. I'm all for information on the weather (something that sometimes gets left out of such books), but I'd also like to know what the people look like. I *think* they're all caucasian (albeit some are more Arabic than Aryan), but I'm even not sure of that.
To be fair, much of this can be brushed aside by not thinking too hard about it, and it's not as if they're likely to affect a game too much. And it does save you the trouble of rolling up the tables yourself. There's obviously a lot of effort that has gone into this, and there are a number of plot hooks, useful NPCs and so on scattered through the book that are certainly handy.
The art content is fairly minimal, and varies from good to embarrassing. The maps are basic and rather pixelated, and could do with a key, as could the colour scheme used in the towns and cities apprendix.
Overall, this is basically a collection of someone's campaign notes. It's not bad for what it is, and $7.50 isn't really a bad price for the sheer size of the thing. There may be some good things in here to make use of elsewhere - if nothing else, there's a good selection of deities. But, on the whole, it's more average than impressive.
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This sourcebook provides twelve planetouched races, going beyond the basic options of aasimar and tieflings. Unlike those two races, each of these has a specific outsider ancestry - lantern archons, dretch, and so on, rather than the more generic "celestials", or whatever.
There's a good balance of types here - of the races, five are descended from celestials of various kinds, five from assorted evil beings, and one each from LN and CN outsiders. The non-celestial parents are similarly varied, with one good and one evil variant for each of elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, and orcs. This, of course, means that we have, among the others, the rather interesting concept of a race with both celestial and orcish blood - and its a combination that works surprisingly well.
The races are not over-powered; like aasimar and tieflings, they all have a +1 level adjustment, and their abilities are broadly equivalent to the ones possessed by those races. Some of the ideas are quite interesting. I like the inclusion of as many good-derived races as evil ones, and the inclusion of efreet among the latter, as well as fiends, gives some variety. It's also nice to see a good range of favoured classes, with some suited to combat, and others to magic.
The races are followed by fifteen new feats, most of them tied to specific races in the book. Some of these are arguably a bit powerful, giving access to the supernatural abilities of some moderately potent outsiders without any meaningful prerequisites.
Finally, there are seven prestige classes. Four of these are fighter-types with enhanced powers based around good, evil, law, and chaos. Of the others, one is essentially a boosted bard (which, for no particularly clear reason has to be female), another is a spellcaster focussed on both healing and inflicting damage, and the other is a means for characters of mixed ancestry to gain the racial abilities and feats of dwarves, elves, and so on. This part of the book, is, I feel, something of a mixed bag.
The layout is fairly basic, although the artwork is reasonable, and the writing could have done with a better edit. One the whole, while I like the idea of many of the races, the feats and prestige classes are less useful and lack the same spark of originality.
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This, as its title implies, is a sourcebook focusing the Cthuloid aspects of the Freeport setting, which have, of course, been there ever since the original adventure trilogy. We get eight evil cults here, any of which could be easily transported to any other fantasy RPG setting - since there are no rules here, the RPG in question doesn't even have to be a variant of d20.
The cults themselves are mostly chaotic evil, with two or three exceptions. Four have more or less directly Mythos inspired origins - Hastur and Yig are, of course, included, and the other two (while never named as such) are Nyarlathotep and Morrigan. A fifth is based on the Forgotten Realm's version of Loviatar, here envisaged as a goddess of BDSM. For the remaining three cults, we have vicious pirates, seekers after forbidden knowledge, and demon-worshippers. Each cult has its own distinct personality and theme, giving a variety of different forms of evil and avoiding a feeling of "sameness".
At 145 pages, this is a large book, and with none of that taken up by stat blocks, that means that each cult can be fully fleshed out. We have their history, mythology, their aims and objectives, rites and rituals, and so on. Furthermore, the actual cult as it exists in, or near, Freeport is described with detailed write-ups of its NPCs, and room-by-room descriptions of whatever passes for its temple - each with a detailed floorplan.
The book is black and white, with high quality artwork. Much of the material in it is pretty gory, although it falls short of explicit detail. Most of the cults, in short, are truly loathsome, and we are left in doubt as to why. Each is also accompanied by a resume of a four-part series of scenarios (you'll have to provide the details yourself) showing how PCs can encounter, fight, and hopefully destroy each cult as they rise in level.
In short, if you're looking for some worshippers of evil and insane gods to include in your game, this is a useful resource, with plenty of original ideas. Although written for Freeport, it could easily be transplanted into any setting where the cosmology fits. The statless nature may be a problem for some, though. You'll have to figure out stats for NPCs, and also work out what magical powers (if any) the evil gods give their followers, and I could see that for some GMs, especially of rules-heavy systems, that could be quite a pain.
But if all you want is ideas, here are some truly memorable and ghastly villains to bring a taste of horror to your fantasy game.
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This quite a large supplement for the price - 77 pages, discounting cover, contents, and license. It's a list of fifteen plants suitable for a fantasy world. They're specifically linked to the Ados campaign setting by the same publishers, but there's no reason why they'd have to be. Plants are just plants, after all.
However, the book is more than a description of some odd botany. Each plant comes with an extensive rules section, explaining how it can be used to make potions, items, armour, and the like. All of these various items are summarised in tables at the back, and cover a wide range of low-level, mostly non-magical, goodies. The list of these items, and their linking to specific features of the world, in the form of unusual plants, is the heart of the book.
The page count is upped by adding in scenario hooks to each plant, with stat blocks for NPCs who want to hire the PCs to collect the stuff, or want to steal it of somebody else, or whatever. This does feel a little like padding, especially since the stat blocks aren't always terribly relevant, but it does at least give some ideas for short encounters.
The layout is very basic, although the artwork isn't bad, and it shouldn't be tough on printer ink. All in all, it's a useful little supplement that could add colour and useful material to a game world, whether one's using it with its intended setting or not.
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This is a short gothic-themed scenario for low-level characters, with clear nods to HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Robert W Chambers. It's beautifully illustrated, with high quality full-coloured maps, and is an original, if simple, idea. The adventure itself is 10 pages long (plus 2 pages of maps) and essentially consists of just two linked encounters, but should serve as a nice diversion in the midst of something longer.
The downside is that it's clearly intended as a diversion from some other specific adventure - I have no clue which one, and legal reasons apparently prevent the publishers from saying! Fortunately, it should be adaptable enough to insert somewhere else, since all it really requires is a village with some light woodlands nearby. It's well done, and worth a look, but one wonders what the point of linking it to some mysterious, unnamed, other scenario was when it didn't need to be...
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Publisher Reply: |
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Hi JK,
Thanks for your purchase and your review! I'm glad you enjoyed the adventure's style and atmospherics of the adventure. I actually just ran this adventure and its companion, "The Fiddler's Lament," in my own home campaign the last two weeks and had a lot of fun with them as well. You don't always get the chance to run the things your own company produces, but I did and they went great!
All that aside, the answer to your question is contained on page 3 of the adventure on the credits page under "Special Thanks." All of our Gothic Adventure Path Plug-Ins are designed first and foremost as a great horror-themed Pathfinder RPG accessories, but each of them also has a natural connection to a particular Paizo Adventure Path. If you'd like more information about that Paizo AP, you can access a free download of the player's guide to their Gothic Horror AP at this link: http://paizo.com/products/btpy8j0q?Pathfinder-Adventure-Path-Carrion-Crown-Players-Guide.
I look forward to your continued business and hope to see more reviews from you. If you ever have questions about our products or simply want to order directly from us, contact us at makeyourgamelegendary@gmail.com!
Jason Nelson
Publisher, Legendary Games |
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This is a city-based scenario in which the PCs become involved with the conflict between two criminal gangs. It's event driven, rather than location driven, with a relatively linear plot. That may lead to issues if the PCs choose to do something unexpected, although it's more likely that they would circumvent sections if this happened, rather than cause the entire plot to collapse. In fact, as linear plots go, it's quite well done, with much of the action following on logically, rather than assuming to much of the PCs - still, players who prefer a more sandbox style might notice they're being herded. Speaking of which, I particularly like the chase sequence, which should be great fun if the players go along with it.
A strong point with the scenario, however, is the amount of background detail on the setting. Much of this has nothing to do with the plot, and so can be safely discarded if you need to set the scenario in a detailed pre-existing city in another campaign world. (For example, the city doesn't even have to be on a river for the scenario to work). Having said that, it's well done, and much of it can be put anywhere, giving a feel to the setting that not only brings it to life, but provides the PCs with plenty to do outside of the core plot. In particular, there a good number of well-described NPCs in the appendix, some of whom have no direct involvement in the plot at all (they may, of course, have had a bigger role in later scenarios in the series) but do give plenty of opportunity for interaction.
The artwork is good quality line art, some if it excellent. The maps, on the other hand, are just geomorphs, although they're as good as one could reasonably expect a geomorph to be. The scenario was intended as an introduction to a longer series, but is also designed to work well as a stand-alone, and is a good and well-written example of its kind.
[Note: The later parts of the series were not, so far as I can tell, ever published.]
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"The Green Dragon" describes that staple of fantasy gaming, a good quality inn with a mixed clientele. The inn is moderately sized, although not exactly large, and has a number of amenities in addition to the large tavern room. If you're looking for an inn to add to a city, or possibly even a more out-of-the-way location, this is a supplement, as with everything I've seen so far in the "City Streets" series, that's well worth the price.
The maps are hand-drawn, and not quite up the standard of those in the previous two entries in the series, but they're perfectly good for their intended purpose, showing all the key locations and giving a clear idea of scale. For some reason, each floor plan is repeated twice in the book, but even ignoring the duplicated bits, you have nine pages of content here, which is slightly more than in the earlier entries in the series.
Unlike those previous two, the plot hooks here aren't in the inn itself, or its history, but in the mixed bag of characters who call it home. They are well described, although statless, as this series is system neutral. For most, writing up stats shouldn't be hard in any system, but it's their backgrounds and personalities that make the place interesting. And, of course, that provide for the potential plots. Some are implicit simply in who they are, but a selection of plot ideas is provided for those who want something more explicit.
More than just a regular inn, this one provides plenty of opportunity for your PCs to get involved in the lives of its inhabitants, and get a short adventure or two out of it.
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