Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 2008634" data-attributes="member: 1">City Guide I: Everyday Life is a collection of shops and establishments for use in your own game.  It's not a town or village in itself; each location is discrete and independent, so it is easy to just grab the ones you want.There are thirteen locations in total: [*]Miralles’s - a herbalist/healer[*]Blithes Spirits - a shop/brewery[*]Scribes and Paper[*]Gizelle’s Fine Herbs and Potions[*]Silken Dreams[*]Traken Brother’s Stables[*]Ringing Steel - a blacksmith/weaponsmith[*]diCarpoli’s Shoes[*]The Armorium[*]Reston’s Wood Creations - a master carpenter.[*]Expedition Outfitters[*]Stormfeather’s Fletchery[*]Blue Flame InnEach location contains a description of the establishment, lists of wares and prices, details of layout plus the residence of the owner, various NPCs and details of special items found there.  The amount of information for each varies, some as short as 3 pages in length (the herbalist), others as long as 9 pages (the tavern).  They are well thought out, well detailed and fairly interesting, with colourful, well-rounded characters.As presented, however, they are not going to fit into everyone's game.  The authors preume a certain level of magic in your world (I presume they used the core rules standards as a guide); for many this will be too high.  Most of the NPCs have various magical items about their person, and many of the locaitons have magical elements about them - the Blue Flame Inn, for example, is lit by a large well of magical blue eldritch flame.  There's nothing wrong with that, of course - but if you do run a low magic game you'll need to tweak some of the locations and NPCs.That said, tweaking them to suit your game shouldn't present a problem - certainly not enough of a problem for me to mark this product down.  If they had presented a low magic set of locations, I would have criticised it for not pandering to those who run high magic campaigns. A default level must be selected, and that default level is never going to be right for everyone.If I were to make a suggestion, it would be that they take a leaf from Thunderhead Games' book, and present with each location a scaling table.  That way, you could easily select the 'version' you want - no magic, low magic, medium magic, high magic, for example.All this does not contitute a criticism, but the next point does.  The first paragraph I read in this product (when glancing at a random page) displayed a lack of care concerning grammar.  Looking through the product, I noticed the same mistake prevalent throughout the whole thing - and it's one which bugs me a lot for some reason.  The problem is that the author(s) don't seem to have a handle on the difference between a comma and full-stop (period) or semi-colon.  Sentences such as this are common:"These are just a few samples of what you could come up with, you’re encouraged to find new and inventive dishes, the mastercook is able to come up with almost anything, you want Pizza, then add Pizza, it’s your world, have fun with it."It's a minor gripe, but it bothers me nonetheless, especially when the mistake is repeated frequently.All in all, though, this is worth the buy.  I'll certainly be using it in my game.</blockquote>

Verification