Fantasy Player’s Companion: Contacts (Revised)
Contacts, those characters who supply the PCs with information or aid. Most DMs and PCs have their favorites to pull out when they are needed or to go see when the PCs need someone who is likely to have the needed information, or is likely to give them shelter when the watch is looking for the PCs.
Fantasy Player’s Companion: Contacts provides rules for obtaining contacts, and generating contacts that are tied to specific PCs.
A description of the role the contacts serve starts the book, with an overview of the common types of contact - Information, Skill, and Influence. A quick method for allocating contacts by class and level, unsurprisingly bards gain contacts more swiftly than most other classes, clerics, paladins and rogues are the next, followed by fighters and sorcerers, while barbarians, druids, monks, rangers, and wizard tie for last.
Some of the Contact Feats seem a trifle underpowered, Extra Contact grants a single extra contact and may be taken several times, while other feats provide contacts that are more powerful, or more wealthy and willing to aid the character in time of need.
The revised edition also supplies full page sheets for the contacts, with half the page dedicated to a description of the contact, including a stat block, and the lower half is a form for customizing the NPC to the campaign, with spaces for where the contact may be found, where he was met last, distinguishing mannerisms and accent, and most importantly what information the contact knows, and a tick box for whether the contact has yet shared the information with the party, very handy for leaking information to the party while crafting an adventure..
The format for these contacts is very clear and easily understood, a great improvement over the original, which is included in the Zip file containing the book. I will be using the format for my own homebrew contacts, it is logical and the ease of customizing the characters is greatly appreciated.
There are 16 principle pages, with the OGL license bringing the total to 17. The first page doubles as the cover, there is no separate title page. There is only a single black and white illustration (by none other than Larry Elmore), and no printed border, making this a very printer friendly product.
I would have liked to have seen a few more contacts, especially those of dubious repute (fences and stool pigeons), and would have loved a blank fillable forms version of the contacts sheet, but I will hope that a future Ronin Arts release covers this. Over all I found this as useful as a starting point for creating my own contacts as I do as a sourcebook. 4 out of 5 stars.
