The Village of Briarton is a 48 page softcover d20 sourcebook from Gold Rush Games. It's priced at the remarkably high $14.95. It's also apparently available as a PDF, with stats for the NPCs in the Action! system as well as d20. (I'm curious how they convert things like magic and D&D class features, like a Paladin's horse).
Basically, it details the village of Briarton, which is supposed to be a generic fantasy village. It's a fairly small village, and frankly, is a bit of a dump. It's very very medieval. Generally speaking, my D&D worlds are not medieval, more Roman or Byzantine (at least not having a dark ages mentality causing a deliberate ignorance of people to forget basic things like hygiene and plumbing...or regard them as a tool of the devil).
The NPCs who inhabit Briarton have fairly well detailed backgrounds, which I like, but they don't really have any connection to other people in the village, with two exceptions (There's a cult with 3 members, and there's a love triangle between a barmaid, a half-orc kid, and a cult member). It's almost like they're entries in a book on NPCs, as opposed to the inhabitants of a small village.
Most of the NPCs detailed are fairly normal villagers. There are 10 or so businesses and their owners/operators: Blacksmith, Brewer, Carpenter, Glassblower, Miller, etc. Most of them have d20 stats, but not all. They're all pretty medieval, the only one that seems suited for a fantasy setting is the Curio Shop. (Though the owner is apparently also fairly medieval - at 35, she's a widow and has grown up children.) Similarly, the demographics are like of a medieval village - all human it seems, save the token half-orc (there's also a dwarf in the manor of the lord of the area).
The NPCs who live outside Briarton are somewhat more intersting, and are probably the best part of the book, though perhaps a bit cliched. There's a washed up Paladin, a hermit Wizard, a gruff Ranger, and a friendly Druid. They also all know each other, though apparently they all like each other, which isn't exactly a complex relationship.
There are apparently about 450 people in the greater Briarton area, and about 50 of them are described in some fashion. I think I would have liked more info about the rest of these people, not specifically, as that would be a gigantic book, but vague demographic information.
There also seems to be some things missing. For instance, there doesn't seem to be any sort of police force or military protection, which is rather odd, it apparently being in a frontier region. Briarton's history includes a raid by orcs, so you'd think that they would have learned a lesson. Quite frankly, it seems a rather poorly run place - there doesn't seem to be any sort of civic planning or infrastructure. I have to wonder why these people would come all the way to a frontier to live in a poorly protected dump. (OTOH, people do live in Arkansas...)
Lastly there's some info about the secret cult in Briarton, which isn't terribly scary, and some crunch bits revolving it. Earlier in the book there is also some rules info about the Hearth domain (for clerics). However, it's a bit confusing because one of the spells in it is listed as being 4th level, but the sample cleric that has that domain has it as a 3rd level spell. This spell is also used in the village itself, so clearly it must be a spell that NPC has.
The art is generally pretty good, and there is a lot of it. One odd thing, is that many of the illustrations are sort of androgynous, unless they have facial hair, it can be hard to figure out the sex of the person in the illustration, and thus who the picture is supposed to be of. There's another picture of an one armed woman that is disturbing - not because of her missing arm, but because her head is larger than her body. She looks literally like a bobblehead doll. Very creepy. But other than that, the art is good, excellent in some cases.
There are only 5 maps, 2 outdoor (one showing the region around Briarton and a town map of Briarton) and 3 indoor. To put it bluntly, the outdoor maps are awful. They look like they were put together on a computer in about 10 minutes. They're also very blurry. The one map that has a distance key (not the regional map, where it would have been much more useful) unfortunately is so blurry the numbers can't be read.
The indoor maps, which are for 3 prominant buildings, are much better, quite good actually, but still suffer from some bluriness and from being converted from color to greyscale. (I would hope these are still in color in the PDF...). They're also somewhat small.
While I probably don't sound enthusiastic about it, it's an okay product, it's just not nearly as good as two similar products I've recently gotten (and reviewed - 7 Cities and the Hamlet of Thumble). If you can get it cheap (like trading for the extra copy I have...<g>), it's worth it. It's probably not worth the cover price when you can get similar products that offer more bang for the buck (besides the aforementioned 7 Cities and the Hamlet of Thumble (if you like halflings), there's Shades of Yesterday, Sanctuary for Sov. Stone, and even the co-author's own Unhallowed Halls).
I also really think it's perhaps more suited for something like Ars Magica than the typical D&D setting because of it's medievalness. It just doesn't feel D&D-ish.
But, if you have 7 Cities, don't like halflings, and need another village for your game, Briarton is definitely worth a look. C- (would be higher if the price weren't so steep and the maps were better and the villagers had more interaction)
