City Guide – Nautical Necessities
By Daniel Farley, Laura Campbell, Paula Johanson, Patrick Lawinger, Neal Levin, David Woodrum
Published by Dark Quest, LLC
Pages: 58 + OGL
Fully bookmarked
Disclaimer: This is not a playtest review. I did not buy City Guide – Nautical Necessities, it was sent to me for review as part of
Crothian’s Review Project.
City Guide – Nautical Necessities is a sourcebook designed to provide over a dozen colorfully fleshed out drop-in locations to a seafaring campaign. These include a cartography shop, a boarding house for visiting sailors, a provision store, a bait shop, a port authority featuring a dry dock, a shipwright and an inn, a tattoo parlour, a tavern, and five different ships.
The PDF itself comes zipped, which also includes the front cover art. Gillian Pearce does both the cover painting and interior line-drawn artwork, and for the most part it is above average. The front cover does an excellent job of balancing and blending colour, so much so that I’m willing to overlook some of the odd proportions of the prominently-featured elven female pirate, about to take to her ship’s rigging. (Within their sockets, the orbs of her eyeballs must be the size of oranges!) The PDF is bookmarked, and it also features a Table of Contents on the first page for those who wish to print it out. Every page but the last, which contains the OGL, features header and footer artwork. The header contains the first half of the product’s title, “City Guide”, and a near-water view of several ships berthed at a city dock. The footer is mostly taken up by a large, toner-hungry black banner, along with the second half of the product title, “Nautical Neccessities” [sic]. Yes, Virginia, there is a typo on every page, and it even makes its way on to the front cover too! For everybody at Dark Quest Games’ sake, I really hope that my review copy isn’t the final version of the product. The text itself is otherwise in the standard two-column, portrait format, and the frequent stat-blocks are in the original, pre-DMG2, compact style.
Nautical Necessities opens with a short story featuring pirates, a buried treasure map, and several somewhat exotic characters and locations, giving a sense of the sourcebook’s flavour and setting the mood for pirate-y adventure. Arrr... And then it does something rather odd. It immediately drops the reader into the first detailed location, sans any forewarning or introductory text describing what the product aims to do or how one should try to use it.
Each of the dozen-odd locations are richly described, and include “read aloud”-text, numerous detailed NPCs, multiple character/plot hooks, and prices for the various goods and services offered. Occasionally the text will boldly point out where enterprising players may find some booty, which is to say, treasure. The locations all have plenty of “meat” to them, spanning from two to eight pages of text, and tend to be very detailed, providing most everything needed to run any encounters therein with a minimum of fuss. For example, the shipwright location contains a list of ships that can be built, including prices and a short description of each hull type. Conspicuously missing, however, are maps, and I’m not talking treasure maps. Sadly, none of the otherwise exceptionally detailed locations in Nautical Necessities feature any floor or deck plans to speak of.
While for the most part the editing of the text is quite good, I did find numerous typos and inconsistencies, on the first page! As previously mentioned, the biggest is the misspelling of the product’s name. In the TOC, “Gentleman’s Provisions” is spelled “Gentleman’s Provissions”, and in the bookmarks, it is instead called “The Gentleman’s Provision Shop”. Furthermore, a TOC entry lists “Shipwright, Port Authority, Pub & Inn”, but the bookmarks break this down into “Shipwright, Port Authority & Inn”, and “The Scurvy Prawn Pub & Inn”. I don’t think it matters one way or the other, personally, but it should be consistent. Interestingly, the titles at the beginning of each individual section tend to agree with the bookmarks, as opposed to the Table of Contents.
A cursory examination of some of the stat-blocks revealed a handful of minor errors, enough that I would probably briefly check each of them before running a particular section. For example, Ensign Davy on p.35 seems to be missing a feat, perhaps originally he wasn’t human. Occasionally a minor formatting error crops up, usually involving parentheses. For example, note the nesting, as Selma Dart on p.36 has the “Skill Focus (Craft (brewing)” feat. That kind of thing is not uncommon. Officer Rhys on p.39 is missing a hit point; he is listed as a Commoner 1/Expert 2 with “1d4+1 plus 2d6+1” Hit Dice. Instead it should read “1d4+1 plus 2d6+2” Hit Dice, as the bonus comes from his Constitution score.
Skill ranks are included for some stat-blocks but not others, specifically for the crew of the five ships at the end of the product. In addition, it isn’t explicitly explained what the numbers in the breakdown of skill bonus are meant to represent. For example, the dockmaster Dahomey on p.39 has the following under skills: “Balance +4 (1 (2) + 3)”. While it probably means 1 skill rank, purchased cross-class with 2 skill points, and a +3 modifier for Dexterity, my point is simply that it can take some unnecessary head-scratching to figure out what is meant by things like this.
In addition, my copy of Nautical Necessities is missing page 41. There is an obvious formatting glitch near the bottom of the first page 40, and page 41 is replaced with a corrected copy of page 40. The contents of page 41 itself are missing, presumably lost at sea.
If you’re running a nautically-themed campaign, City Guide – Nautical Necessities is worth considering. The locations it provides are more than just the run-of-the-mill watering hole and bawdy house, and they are for the most part creative and well-written. If your campaign doesn’t take to the high seas, however, it will be more difficult to make use of these locations as they are. Some of them are general enough to find a place in most games, but much of their flavour is tied to old salt. Using them at a stop not along a coast frequented by pirates and privateers would be like placing an iceberg in the middle of a desert. It could work, and it may be interesting, but it would definitely seem out of place. Unfortunately, the product contains no maps, not even for the five-odd ships towards the end. Personally, I’m of the opinion that maps are an essential part of any location, especially one whose intent is to make the DM’s life easier. And since I’m probably not the only one who doesn’t know his cog from his sloop, I feel the lack of deck plans for the various ships especially is a huge omission.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
