4 out of 5 rating for Homeward Bound - simple rules for player-owned base
This nice piece of work is formally related to the Forgotten Realms, but it is pretty easy to use with a bit any ruleset and with any setting leaning to fantasy or steampunk. Its best point is its adaptability: you can use all the content in this book and just drop it in your campaign or you can use only parts of it or a tailor-made reduction.
This module is dedicated to characters' homes: how to acquire them, how to make them realistic, how to build them up making them interesting (with some collaboration from the players as well), how to make them meaningful for the characters (and not just a tick box indicating that you know where to go when you are not off adventuring), how to improve them and how to make a profit out of them, how to make the players interested in coming back to their homes routinely, between an adventure and the other, how you can populate the surrounding of the heroes' manor with good and bad neighbours, with mysterious neoighbours, with markets, temples, legends, places to visit and sources of informations...
Finally, this mass of information, characters and locations all subtly interrelated may become so big that it may turn into a proper campaign that can be run as the main campaign or may become an "on-and-off" secondary campaign that can become your focus when you are not away adventuring.
Overall a nice and well-crafted support for all DMs, with plenty of nice ideas ready to be dropped into about any campaign. It is interesting to see how proposals are quite realistic and well-thought: everything makes sense.
I also appreciated how a fair share of the images are actual photos from real manors and landscapes, giving an even better feeling of realism.
