Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011916" data-attributes="member: 18387">Note: This is NOT a boxed set. It ended up being released as a hardcover. There is to be a boxed set for the Wilderlands setting.City State of the Invincible Overlord is the D20 conversion of the (in)famous Judges Guild product. The D20 conversion editing was done by Scott Greene, of Tome of Horrors I and II fame. The book has Black and White illustrations with several pages of gridded greyscale maps on high gloss paper stock. It has 382 pages of material, including indexes that help you find Streets and locations. There is an NPC index created by a fan available as a download at the Judges Guild website. There is also a fantastic "sister" city done by another fan set in the Wilderlands area called Altanis. That city, like CSIO (City State of the Invincible Overlord), are easily portable into any campaign. The hardest thing a DM needs to do to allow this is to forget the history provided and write their own. This book is the best write-up I have seen since the boxed set for the City of Waterdeep. It has everything.Chapter 1 gives an overview of the various organizations within the city as well as the game statistics for the city itself, which has an average population of 80,000. It is a big city but only a 1/3 the population of Waterdeep. Not only does it give an overview, but you also get a sense of each organizations overall personality. On page five you also get a table breaking down military unit sizes with a "Regular Army title" and a "Noble Army title".Chapter 2 introduces new rules ideas, such as "social factor", which is a ranking of social status and giving a hierarchy and how they rate/rank against each other. This is because there isn't only one social class, so each societal part of the city gets their own social level ranking and then a table showing how these social ranks measure up to the other social ranks. Three examples are the Nobles, the guilds, and the Merchants. There are six social classifications in all. This chapter also introduces their version of the skills Gambling, Interrogation, and Torture, along with helpful tables listing DC's and DC modifiers. If you incorporate the slavery aspect of this city (it is ruled by a L/E King), there is a very good chart on page 14 that helps a DM determine the going price of a slave, based on age, skills, attributes, etc...There are also two PrC's introduced in this chapter. A 5 level Agent of the Black Lotus PrC and a 10 level Beggar class. Personally, I like them both, they are great for adding story flavor to this city and I have several plans in how to utilize them as NPC's. I do not foresee any players being excited to play one. They are not nearly powerful enough. There is also a neat little Beggar physical/mental deformity table on the last page of the chapter.Chapter 3 is probably my favorite chapter in the whole book. It is the Crime and Punishment Chapter. There are 18 tables in this chapter to help the DM determine the severity of a crime, the punishment of a crime, the attitude of the Judge, how the attitude of the judge effects their ruling, and even how the weather will effect the judges mood and therefore the sentence. It also has tables detailing the punishments, including methods of torture and how much they will hurt as well as how survivable they are. It also has tables to determine Bribery amounts and results. All in all, a very wonderful chapter that I am very eager to use in my game.Chapter 4 contains the City Encounters charts/tables. For example, the City Folk Encounter Table breaks encounters down by Hierarchy versus their Social Level and also gives you a class level range and how much money they are carrying on their person. They also have encounter tables for specific City Quarters, an Unusual Encounters table which are monsters you could run into, a special encounters table which details events such as getting spit upon to running into a lamplighter. If you run into a town crier there are sub-tables telling what the town crier is saying, from a call to arms to the birth of a prince. There are even a set of tables to help the DM/Judge determine the reason/motivations behind encounters. There are also a couple of tables that illustrate the cosmopolitan nature of this city. There are at least 21 races a person can expect to run into, several of which are unique to the Wilderlands, so DM replacements may be necessary.Chapter 5 is a very short chapter that gives you statistics for common items such as chests and doors in the CSIO. It also gives brief explanations of how the City stays peaceful and other important information about presenting the street life of the city.Chapter 6 is another short chapter made up entirely of tables for rolling random rumors and legends of the CSIO.Chapter 7 is a meaty chapter giving you street by street breakdowns of possible encounters.Chapter 8 is another impressive chapter. It starts off giving the DM/Judge 12 numbered locations to make up the details of for themselves. It then goes on to detail 339 additional locations for the DM to use. Locations such as temples, 4 or 5 of which are given far greater detail in later chapters, numerous Inns and Taverns, Candle Makers, a Phrenologist, Carpenters, Glassblowers, a Bear Trainer, Saddleshops, Sail Maker, Racketeer, a Pet Shop, etc.... All including basic NPC info. This is where that NPC download I have mentioned comes in handy. This chapter runs from page 47 to page 134.Chapter 9 is the first chapter detailing what is called the Wraith Overlord, Beneath the City State. This goes into the sewer/underground areas of the city, the history, some story ideas, and other information.Chapter 10 details the City Jail. It also gives the history of a number of the individuals who are imprisoned here. It also details the various torture chambers and the Jails connection to the sewers/undercity areas, called The Pit. Which is where they throw the insane.Chapters 11-13 details temples, their priests, their treasures, there lay-outs, and where they are connected through the sewers. Lots of good adventure seeds in these chapters. Of course there have been tons of adventure ideas throughout the whole book!Chapter 14 details the Thieves Guild. Nuff' said.Chapter 15 covers what is called the Despot Ruins. The ruins are the areas where two ancient fortresses once stood. Not terribly detailed, but I consider that a good thing, since I have several old modules and Dungeon adventures I can use to add the detail I want.Chapter 16 covers another temple. The temple of the Spider-god. No, this isn't a rip off of a certain abyssal spider demoness. This temple is definitely about spiders. Lots of them, some of them very deadly to low level characters (CR3 spiders).Chapter 17 covers another very interesting area. However, I am not going to provide any details of it here. It is best to make it as hard as possible for players to know anything about this.Chapter 18 covers something called the Watchtower. It is a place that could easily become a location repeatedly visited by PC's. That's all I'll say about this place as well.Chapter 19 gives detail about the Patrician Theater's lower levels. The upper level was detailed at location 158 in Chapter 8. More secret stuff I don't want to tip off players to.Chapter 20 details the School of Ancient Knowledge. Again the above ground portion was detailed in Chapter 8. This school caters to anyone who is seeking any kind of knowledge.  Appendix 1 gives details of the most important NPC's in the city, namely the Invincible Overlord himself, the Grand Vizier, and a certain NPC with many tentacles hanging where his mouth would be.Appendix 2 details magic items introduced in this book.Appendix 3 is the monsters, a fair number of which are/were created within the walls of CSIO. Two templates are here, one is the skeletal thief/warrior template, the other is for creating Wraith Spiders.So what is my overall opinion of this book? Awesome!! I loved reading this. I am psyched about all of the story ideas this book gave me. I am actually eager to sit down and bring this city to life. I am glad this city is so campaign portable because my current campaign is based in Erde. My last campaign was based in the Wilderlands. So I still get to unleash the wonders of this city in my Erde campaign! Or I could use it in Greyhawk, or even Ravenloft, since there are a fair number of undead in this city, and I could easily make the Overlord a Darkpower of Ravenloft. Plus this comes with a rich, old, campaign world known as the Wilderlands! This book, combined with the Players Guide to the Wilderlands, the boxed set coming out in a few months, plus with the wonderful fan downloads at judgeguild.net, make for a very rich and basic campaign world, with at least 4 more support products coming out! Plus the Caverns of Thracia are already out in stores now.This is just an awesome product! Any DM who wants good cities to put in their campaign world needs to get this book. It is hardbound with nice black and white illustrations throughout, an excellent NPC spreadsheet at Judgesguild.net, plus well written locations that just gets a DMs creative ideas bursting while reading them.Websites you can go to for fan downloads and up coming product releases: http://www.judgesguild.net or http://www.necromancergames.com.</blockquote>

Verification