Freedom City

[Messageboard Golem]

Welcome to Freedom City! Players of Mutants & Masterminds were introduced to this bustling metropolis in the game's very first adventure. Now acclaimed Mutants & Masterminds author Steve Kenson presents a complete and detailed city setting for four-color superhero adventures. Freedom City includes a detailed history, an overview of the city's diverse neighborhoods, scores of locations and backdrops, a cast of supporting characters, three complete hero teams, and dozens of villains, all ready to use! Freedom City is packed with ideas and adventure hooks that make it ideal for players and gamemasters of Mutants & Masterminds and other superhero RPGs as well. Richly detailed and lavishly illustrated in full color, Freedom City is the ideal companion book to the Mutants & Masterminds Roleplaying Game. December, 2002.

 

[GameWyrd]

If you’d ask me to name a top five d20 list then Mutants & Masterminds would be included in it before I had to think. The GM Screen was pretty good too, but we’ll not count that as the first support for the game, Freedom City has the honour and the challenge of being the first book to try and carry on the tradition of excellence.

Excellent? No. Pretty damn good? Yes.

Freedom City is in a style that superhero RPGers will recognise but might just be a little too alien for "We-Only-Play-Fantasy-With-Elves-Dwarves-And-Fighers" RPGers. There are no stats for new monsters – instead there are plenty of stats for individual heroes, villains and mundanes. You’re given the background stories, carefully interwoven with other heroes and villains, for each Freedom City character. That’s what the book does, it gives you the history of key characters throughout the history of the city and, of course, it gives you the history of the city itself.

Freedom City is a campaign setting; it’s an example of why "campaign setting" is a better term than "world setting". Freedom City is as valid a campaign setting for a Mutants & Masterminds game as Gotham if for a Batman game, New York for Spiderman and Metropolis (or Smallville, say) is for Superman. Except you’d be wrong to assume that Freedom City was defined by a solo hero. More often than not there has been at least one group of heroes working together, mainly as a named group but sometimes unofficially and under the radar. This is true even when there was one dominant – most famous, most powerful – hero that had most of the limelight. It’s a well-oiled clockwork creation where the gears fit snugly together and turn in harmony, as all well written and successful campaign settings are. Introducing something new – such as a group of player characters – to Freedom City can be problematic. There’s not much space between the finely tuned clockworks of the city where you could insert new heroes. In fact, the easiest way to get going is to give the players one of the established heroes each and let them play those. But that’s boooooring. The book has other ideas. There is the dreaded RetCon – taking one group out, inserting the PC group and re-writing history – but that undoes much of Freedom’s hard work. A more likely option is to have the players as youngsters, the trainees or the next generation in waiting. This last option means the established, written up heroes, can stay in the picture and be used as mentors, the old guard or as reluctant retirees.

There’s a story around Freedom City too – but it’s only there because it interests the events in Freedom City. Centurion, the unabashed Superman clone and key Freedom City hero, is from a dimension destroyed by one of the setting’s super villains. There are aliens too. Aliens are responsible for tinkering with human gene way back in pre-history and giving mankind a fighting chance against the dominant race of the time – super intelligent lizard folk. The people in Freedom City are used to heroes and villains flying around. They’re not unfamiliar with giant lizard monsters stomping flat a few buildings either. I suppose it all comes together well enough. Freedom City is the superhero equivalent of high fantasy; it doesn’t shy away from the weird and wonderful.

After going through the city’s history and the roles various heroes and villains played in it the book revisits the heroes and villains again. This time, near the end of the book, we’re given a detailed treatment of each hero or set of heroes (in the case of the Atom family and other groups). Players familiar with the hero genre will be used to seeing the key NPCs receiving this much attention. Players drawn out of the fantasy mould by the success of Mutants & Masterminds might just have seen d20 NPC portfolios that are fairly similar. The chapter gives us the chance to admire wonderful illustrations of each hero and get their stats too. Just as important are the extensive paragraphs on background, personality, tactics and campaign use. The heroes also have a "Villain Option" which provides the background twist needed if you’d rather use the hero as a bad guy. For every set of heroes there’s a set of villains as well, these guys are just as well drawn and given just as much background, personality and campaign use treatment. There’s no "Hero Option" for them though, most are just too screwed up. Readers don’t get any prizes for working out which Marvel or DC hero inspired which Freedom City hero, it’s just too easy and innocent overlaps are just too common. A few of the super villains are too powerful to be used as anything other than a plot device – and no bones are made about that.

The middle of the book is concerned with the mundane facts of Freedom; the airports, the TV stations, clubs, colleges and everything you might expect in a city tour guide. There’s even a colour map. Unlike city tour guides, this section in Freedom city isn’t dreadfully dull, sure, okay, it’s not really something you’ll read in bed at night in place of the latest Stephen King but as a GM in search of plot hooks and interesting locales – it does keep your attention.

More than just the physical spaces in Freedom City are given attention from this comprehensive book. There is a whole chapter on the underworld, gangs and low powered (but still above human) villains. Similarly, there’s a chapter on law and order with stats for police, special agents and even the police chief.

The reader isn’t kept in Freedom City all the time. The book quickly offers information about the ancient human colony on the moon, Kaiju (giant monster) Island, Atlantis, the Lost World, Sub-Tera, Utopia and even galactic regimes – like the Grue Empire, the Lor Republic and the Star Knights. There isn’t really enough on any of these settings to take your scenario there and only use material from the book but there’s enough text there to let you take elements (such as heroes, villains and escaping plot devices) from them and spice up Freedom City with.

The book does well where it counts the most – with the content. You’ve got all you need to run a heroes game in Freedom City. It’s worth mentioning that the book is gorgeous. The Super Unicorn team that made Mutants & Masterminds such a work of art has don it again. The hardback, glossy book is bright with colour and eye catching formatting. It’s a pleasure to visit Freedom City.

Freedom City is a campaign setting defined by the non-playing characters in it as much as by the place itself. This is the traditional approach for the genre and I’ve always seen it as a handicap. I wish Freedom had done more to help ease the problem, especially as there’s likely to be some interest from the fantasy core – but Freedom doesn’t ignore the problem, it does make some effort to help the GM. This potential hassle pales considerably in comparison to the overall effect of the book. It’s an easy book to pick up and get into, it presents a city that wants to host your Mutants & Masterminds game and it certainly gave me a city that I’d want to run a Mutants & Masterminds game in. That’s an important success. If you’ve been enthralled with Mutants & Masterminds then you won’t be disappointed with Freedom City.

* This Freedom City review was first published by GameWyrd.

 

[Psion]

Freedom City

Freedom City is a campaign setting book for Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds RPG. The focus of the book is the fictional city, but there are many other aspects of the setting enumerated.

Steve Kenson, author of Mutants & Masterminds, is the lead designer on Freedom City.

A First Look

Freedom City is a 192-page hardcover book priced at $32.95. This is pricey compared to a black-and-white book of the same size, but Freedom City is full color and richly illustrated, so if style is a value to you, you should get your money's worth.

The cover of the book, is illustrated by Ramón Pérez, has a comic style title banner. The illustration depicts heroes introduced in the book floating in front of a statue of Centurion, a deceased hero in the setting.

The interior, as stated, is full color with glossy pages, like the Mutants & Masterminds core book. Interior artists include Greg Kirkpatrick, Dan Panosian, Ramón Pérez, and Craig A. Taillefer. The work has a slick comic book style. The only detraction from the great artwork was one picture that gave us a peak at the panties of a girl in a Sailor Moon style schoolgirl outfit… an image I could have done without.

The interior text is dense, with a small font and close line and paragraph spacing. Overall, considering the color illustration of the book and the text density, the book delivers a decent value based on content quantity and presentation.

A Deeper Look

Freedom City is divided into an introduction and eight chapters.

The introduction of the book paints a picture of the Freedom City universe as the subject of a fictional comic called Amazing Comics, which apparently suffered some of the same foibles as certain real-life comic publishers do. Unlike Green Ronin's Spaceship Zero, Freedom City drops the façade after one page of such amusing ruminations.

Freedom City itself is a fictional city created for the setting, much like DC Comics' Metropolis or Star City, though the book has a bit of an "Astro City" feel. This could be good or bad, depending upon your attitude about such things. It's easy for comic writers to write around such issues, but players aren't so easily put off. I remember having fits about the actual location of Metropolis back when I ran a DC Heroes game.

On the other hand, the freedom to create by not having to adhere to facts - a dangerous activity when it comes to superimposing powered vigilantes on the real world - could be a welcome accommodation for aspiring Mutants & Masterminds GMs.

The introduction to Freedom City also throws in a number of approaches to using the setting. Thought the city has a rich history involving supers, if (for example) you want to make the PCs the only supers in Freedom City, it discusses a few events discussed in the history chapter and altering them to make the PCs into replacements for now dead heroes.

This sort of "campaign adaptation" notes do not stop here. One of the classiest touches to Freedom City is that every chapter has several sidebars discussing possible uses and alterations of the existing material to help fit it to the GM's specific vision of the campaign.

The first chapter defines the history of the Freedom City universe. The history dates way back (as far back as 500,000 BC.) and like many comics, includes many elements that should be familiar to comic book fans, such as an Atlantean civilization, extraterrestrials that tamper with evolution, and so forth. One of the founding premises of the book is that almost anything that could show up in the supers comics could show up here. This can be a good thing, or a bad thing if you feel like I do that some aspects of supers comics were a little too campy to unearth.

Freedom City itself has its roots as an early American colony, as was the case with many major real world east coast cities. There are a few allusions to early supers (and it is a premise of the setting that superpowered beings have existed for some time), but the setting doesn't really become thick with supers until about the same time such comics became popular in real life, in the mid-20th century.

The parallels to popular comic groups are many, but with just enough of a spin to make it a little different. The premier super-hero of Freedom City was named Centurion. But Centurion was not from a far off world, but from an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire never fell; Centurion's Earth was destroyed by a villain named Omega, but he comes to Freedom City Earth and swears that Omega will not repeat his deed there. The default storyline is that Centurion dies in a major battle that most major heroes of the city remember.

Chapters Two through Six discuss freedom city itself in detail… in deep detail. These five chapters are named, respectively: Freedom City Overview, Government, Public Safety, Life in Freedom City, and The Underworld. Delving into the specific details of each of these chapters would be beyond the scope of this review.

However, in summary, the book provides very detailed and functional material for running a supers game set in the city. This includes things like major street maps, major institutions, places of interest (cross references), and there are statistics blocks for stock and specific NPCs that help form the backdrop of such a campaign.

As alluded to earlier, one of the more impressive aspects of the setting is how accommodating it is to the GMs specific campaigns. In addition to things like ideas on altering the history, there are other places where there is a clear eye for accommodation. As an example of one of the earlier sidebars, there is a list of the 20 wealthiest individuals in Freedom City. But some of the positions (including #1) are reserved for campaign use by PCs or NPCs.

Chapter Seven is entitled Beyond Freedom City. This chapter describes aspects of the setting that go beyond the city, but pay homage to many classic comic book tropes. This includes legendary locales on Earth (such as Atlantis, the Lost World, and Sub-Terra), in space (such as a familiar inhabitable area of the moon, and space empires and republics), and other dimensions (such as an "Anti-Earth", an idea played off strongly in many old DC Comics). There is even a reference to Green Ronin's Freeport setting, which put some interesting ideas in my head.

The eighth chapter, Heroes and Villains provides complete history and statistics of major super-powered figures in the Freedom City setting. There are a few super-teams situated in Freedom City by default. The Freedom League has a sort of Justice League/Avengers feel. The Atom Family, aside from the annoying similarity to a comical horror family of note, resembles the Fantastic Four in tone. Finally Next-Gen is an academy which has a feel not too much unlike that of early X-men (and later spin-off titles), Teen Titans, and perhaps a smidgen of Legion of Super-Heroes.

There are also a number of individual heroes, including the Dr. Strange/Dr. Fate like Eldritch and the Spectre/Shadow-like Foreshadow.

The heroes are potentially useful as PCs or can be transplanted to villains. Of course there is even a larger menagerie of villains for use to use against your erstwhile super-heroes. I'll leave individual descriptions out again, with the caveat that again, there are many homages to the four-color comics.

Conclusion

Freedom City is a very attractive book and a strong setting supplement. I was astonished at how much material they were able to cover in this small volume. The ideas seem generally solid and compelling, and it should take nearly any classic comic book fan back to the four-color era that the book so strongly imitates.

If there is any drawback to the setting, it could again be the homages. Some of the stuff from the four-color era was pretty campy, and some of that stuff might be better left behind. Whether things like names that are plays on words or bizarre concepts like animated cartoon villains bug you might be a matter of perspective, but I know that I would have gladly have done without some of these homages.

Overall Grade: A-

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By John Grigsby, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack

Sizing Up the Target
Freedom City is a hardcover supplement for Mutants & Masterminds produced by Green Ronin Publishing. This full-color sourcebook caps at 192 pages and is written by Steve Kenson. It features a beautiful cover from Ramón Pérez, and interior artwork from Pérez, Greg Kirkpatrick, Dan Panosian, and Craig A. Taillefer. Freedom City retails for $32.95.

First Blood
Throughout comics history, super-heroes have staked their claim on a city, real or fictional, to call their own. I guess it made perfect sense then, that Green Ronin’s first supplement for their hit MUTANTS & MASTERMINDS game would be a sourcebook about the city that their own super-team, the Freedom League, uses for their base of operations. Someone on the Green Ronin message boards recently referred to Freedom City as a “Freeport for MUTANTS & MASTERMINDS.” I have to give a nod of agreement to that assessment.

Freedom City is a thriving metropolis of 3,812,500 people (one of many handy facts and figures in the book) that is situated in a non-descript area somewhere along the East Coast. Its exact location is purposefully left vague so that it can be inserted wherever the Game Master desires, though some suggestions are given in a sidebar. The default assumption is that it is located somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard and that it does not displace or replace any existing major city.

The work opens with a few default assumptions regarding the existence of super-beings and the public reaction to such, and then goes into a detailed history of Freedom City, from its founding through October 2002. Along the way, it introduces as few of the heroes who have visited Freedom City in the past and also gives an overview of world events and how they relate to Freedom City. This being a super-hero game, there is also the obligatory “what If…” sidebar, which examines how history might have happened differently than it is depicted in this book, granting GMs free license (as if it didn’t exist already) to do with the setting as they desire.

A full-color map of Freedom City and the surrounding area is included (and is now available at the Green Ronin website as a free PDF download). A section on How To Use This Book presents thoughts and ideas on fitting Freedom City into your individual campaign and how it could be used in an entirely different campaign. This presents some ideas that might be interesting to explore (such as a fantasy version), and this being super-heroes, alternate dimensions are hardly out of the question.

An overview of the city examines the metropolis as a whole, then breaks it down into neighborhoods and details each area with a brief introduction, followed by a listing of the places of interest to be found there (and where they are more fully described elsewhere in the book). Liberally sprinkled throughout this chapter (and the rest of the book) are clippings of newspaper reports, interviews, and sidebars that hint at other ideas and adventure possibilities.

The government and public safety of Freedom City are examined in detail, and game statistics provided for figurehead individuals and for typical non-player characters (such as police officers). More sidebars discuss how certain individuals could be used in a campaign set in Freedom City and “What If…” scenarios, as well as some background on the history of the various departments. There is enough information here that any GM could drop Freedom City into their campaign with a minimum of effort and have a fully functional metropolis (and that’s the way Green Ronin planned it).

Life in Freedom City centers around, well, everyday life in Freedom City. From the media to the favorite restaurants, the high and low spots of this town are covered in loving detail. Statistics are provided for movers and shakers, and biographies are given for important characters not worthy of a full stat block. Freedom City, like any large metropolis, also has its dark side, and this is also touched on. Designer drugs, the names of the big men in town, and even crime rates in Freedom City help bring the underworld to life.

Any good campaign will extend beyond the walls of its chosen base of operations and Freedom City is no exception. The “Earth” of Freedom City is rife with possibilities for adventure, from drowned Atlantis, or Kaiju Island in the Sea of Japan, where huge monsters dwell, to the dark side of the moon, or even other dimensions. Alien races, galactic empires, and atomic dinosaurs can all be found in this comic-book universe and stat blocks are given for typical examples.

Finally, the largest section of the book is devoted to the heroes and villains of Freedom City. The city is home to not less than three super-teams and numerous villain groups, and they’re all here. Every major hero and villain is described complete with a background, appearance, powers, and stat-block, and most are accompanied by a full-color drawing of the character! This section alone makes the book worth every penny. The artwork is beautiful and the characters are rich and detailed. Over 55 heroes, villains, and supporting cast are laid out for the GM to use as she sees fit.

In short, Freedom City is a campaign setting that you can take, warp as you desire, and drop into your MUTANTS & MASTERMINDS campaign with hardly any effort at all. It’s detailed enough that you can begin using it immediately, yet nothing is so set in stone that it can’t be removed, overlooked, or changed without upsetting too much in the setting. In my own campaign, there have never been super-beings in Freedom City. The PCs are among the first of a new breed and the campaign will explore how they (and the public) handle that responsibility.


Critical Hits
So what is the best thing about Freedom City? Well, that’s difficult to say, exactly. There’s so much that is good here that I can’t pinpoint any one thing that stands out above the rest. The artwork, the detail, and the extras all fit together so seamlessly that each contributes to the whole. Take any one element and it’s great on its own, but when combined with the rest, it’s truly magical.

Without doubt, the biggest kick for me is the Easter eggs. Easter eggs, as any fanboy knows, are extras that are inserted into a work (such as a software program or movie) that provide the occasional homage or goodie to reward those who take the time to find them. Freedom City has well over 100 Easter eggs! Everywhere you turn, there’s a name you recognize or a picture that seems vaguely familiar. If Ditko Street (name for Steve Ditko, comic artist extraordinaire) doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps Police Commissioner Barbara Kane (a combination of Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter in the Batman™ legend, and Bob Kane, Batman’s™ creator) will. Factor Four, one of the villain groups, bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain well-known hero group of Marvel Comics fame, and the identity of one of the villains is none other than Adam Ward (a nod to Adam West and Burt Ward, who of course played the Dynamic Duo on TV’s Batman™). Freedom City is literally packed with Easter eggs and a thread devoted to ferreting them out is currently running amuck on the Green Ronin message boards.

It was nice to see that Steve has taken an open-minded viewpoint with Freedom City. All too often, even in modern-era games, the focus is on white heterosexual males. Here may be found gay characters (there is a thriving gay community in Freedom City), females in positions of power and prestige, and minorities as mover-and-shakers. True to its name, Freedom City is a multi-cultural mixing pot where anyone can be a hero, regardless of race, religion, gender, or background. Some may be irked by this openness, but I urge them to get a life! This is as close to the real world as a role-playing game can come.

Last but hardly least, it’s nice to see characters that are well thought out. In Freedom City, the characters (whether super-powered or not) are all given a background, a history, and a motivation. Instead of just a collection of stat blocks, we know why Dr. Metropolis is as strange and detached as he seems. We know why Dr. Stratos hates Captain Thunder so fiercely. And who knew that Johnny Rocket was gay? For me, these things are almost as important as the characters themselves.

Critical Misses
So with all of this goodness, what doesn’t Freedom City have? One major oversight that springs immediately to mind is the lack of an index. This is a wonderful book, absolutely chock-full of great information, but without an index, it means a good bit of thumbing through if you can’t remember where you saw Devil Ray’s stat block, for example. The table of contents can be helpful in this regard, but an index pinpointing every instance of a character or location would have been a crowning touch on a wonderful product.

There are a few minor errors sprinkled throughout the book, including a few spelling hits and an artwork discrepancy, but they don’t really detract from the book that much (and you’d have to look hard to find them). There are also a few errors with a couple of the character write-ups (at least one mathematical error and one stat block that does not agree with the accompanying text), but again, they are minor and still far less than the problems that were associated with the archetypes in the first printing of MUTANTS & MASTERMINDS.

Finally, while many of the heroes has a “villain option” (for the GM to use them as villains in their campaign), almost none of the villains had a “hero” option. Turnabout is fair play! I think that an alternate world where the heroes were the bad guys and the villains were the city’s protectors would be very interesting and I’d love to have seen a heroic option section for the villains in Freedom City. It’s only one paragraph in most instances, describing how their origin and outlook changes, but I still think that not including them was an oversight.

Coup de Grace
As a sourcebook for MUTANTS & MASTERMINDS, this book rates at the top of its class. Best of all, if you ignore the character stat-blocks, it can be squeezed into any existing RPG system with a minimum of effort. Need a city for D20 MODERN? No problem, drop it right in. Looking for a metropolis for your VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE campaign? No sweat, it fits perfectly. This is an excellent, multi-functional sourcebook that can fill any niche, making it a valuable addition to any GM’s library, regardless of whether or not they play MUTANTS AND MASTERMINDS.

The game system uses a little different mechanics than standard d20, but is pretty close. However, as I noted, I did find a few minor problems with the character write-ups. It’s nothing a pencil couldn’t fix, but it’s worth noting. There are a great many nods to existing people and characters, but overall, the originality of Freedom City is beautiful in its diversity. Steve has done a fantastic job of breathing life into what could have been a collection of locales and flat characters. Whether you are a player or a GM, you’ll find Freedom City to be a home away from your home.

The only place the supplement suffers in on Open Gaming Content. That’s the nature of a beast like this. Only the character stat blocks and some of the special equipment and designer drugs are labeled as OGC. This is to be expected because of the amount of background material versus crunchy bits in Freedom City. But for that and the lack of an index, this book would be pretty close to perfect.

To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

The Basics
Freedom City is a campaign setting supplement for Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds superhero role-playing game. A king-sized supplement, 192 pages long, it has superb cover illustrations, and full color interior artwork Cost: $32.95. (Although Amazon seems to selling it for more like $26)

Freedom City is a simple concept, which the comics have used for ages. It's a fictional city, like Gotham or Metropolis or Astro City, which serves as a backdrop to the heroes' adventures. This is intrinsically a good idea. Using a real city as a setting can be exhausting. There's always far too much research to be done and a chance that one of your players knows the actual city better than you do.

Nowhere in particular on the Eastern Seaboard, Freedom city is a community of about 4 million people, smaller than Miami or New York, bigger than Baltimore, perhaps roughly the size and age of Philadelphia. It isn't meant to replace any real cities, and can be set anywhere in the Northeast. There are also brief suggestions on how to place it somewhere else.

After establishing a few ground rules about superheroes and their place in the world, the book details the history of Freedom City, from its founding as a refuge from British oppression (that's why they called it "Freedom City!") Through its role in the Revolutionary War, through the 19th Century, the Pulp Era, World War II, the comic book slump of the 1950s, the superhero resurgence of the early 1960s, the turbulent years that followed, on through the "dark, troubled" 1980s and finally to the present. At every stage it skillfully mixes the history of comic-book reality with real American history.

So, for example, the decline in superhero comics in the '50s, as well as the imposition of the restrictive "Comics Code" is here melded together with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its investigations. Superheroes come under the same kind of negative scrutiny that comics did in our world. In the late '80s and early '90s, new "darker" heroes began to stalk the streets of Freedom City, just as they began to stalk the pages of our favorite comics. This is all handled with real style and cleverness. The writer's love and understanding of the medium are clearly evident.

As we learn about the history of Freedom City we learn bits and pieces about the rest of the world it is set in, but this information is always vaguer and more general, to make it easier for the GM to fit the book into their own campaign.

We move on to an overview of Freedom City in the present. It's neighborhoods, restaurants, night spots, monuments, police force, vital statistics and prominent citizens, etc. There is a wealth of information here, enough to use this city as a setting for a non-superhero game without it feeling thin. A great deal of effort has clearly gone into giving this city the feel of a working, breathing metropolis. It's also full of in-jokes. The Police Commissioner's name is Barbara Kane (Barbara Gordon meets Bob Kane) there's a character named Adam Ward, and there are many other such little references squirreled away in the text. NPC stats are given for things like generic police officers, as well as for named NPCs.

A section describes Freedom's City's underworld in some detail. Designer drugs are a particular problem in Freedom City and the Mafia has an old entrenched presence here. This section is as detailed as the section on the city's prominent citizens, and at least as useful.

Other locations beyond Freedom City's confines are described. Wisely, most of them are distant and exotic places that could be easily dropped into or left out of an existing campaign. We hear about Kanju Island, where giant atomic monsters rampage off the coast of Japan. We hear about the mysterious city on the dark side of the moon, alien empires off somewhere in the depths of space, an alternate dimension or two, but we get very little about New York or Washington DC. This is as it should be.

The longest and last section of the book is devoted to the heroes and villains of Freedom City. This is where the book really shines. More than fifty individual characters are detailed, all of them interesting, all them in one way or another an homage to classic cartoon heroes and villains. Strange send ups of Johnny Quest, the Fantastic Four (as villains!), Batman, Superman and Dexter's Laboratory (?!) can all be found here. This is really superb stuff, iconic yet unique. It also provides more much-needed examples of how to make M&M's deceptively simple character generation system actually work.

There is a full color map of Freedom City in the back. It's also available from Green Ronin in ..pdf form, for free.

What I Liked: The production values are outstanding, particularly for a little house like Green Ronin. The pages are glossy, the book is solidly assembled. The artwork is consistently fine and there is a lot of it. Virtually all of the 55 odd heroes and villains have their own portraits.

While the price may be high, there's an immense amount of material included, and the book itself is so well produced that it's clear your money has been well-spent.

The tone of the work is very consistent, cheerful and "silver age" rather than dark and ugly. Anon-revisionist (or post revisionist) comic, it's somewhere between Zot!, Astro City and the Superfriends. A lot of superhero games (Aberrant, Trinity, Brave New World, Godlike) shy away from their comic book roots, and try hard to avoid even mentioning the word "Superhero." Freedom City, on the other hand, revels in its cheesy origins.

This book is lighthearted and fun, but it does not shy away from difficult topics. Freedom City has had corrupt mayors, bad cops and racial tensions. There is a white supremacist arch-villain who makes no bones about his agenda, Freedom City has a thriving gay neighborhood and one of its most prominent superheroes has recently been "outed". All this stuff is just presented in a matter-of-course kind of way. There is nothing sensationalistic or self-conscious about it. These things are a part of the real world, so they're a part of Freedom City, too.

What I didn't Like
This book is nearly 200 pages long, and there's no index! It's pretty well organized, but geez! This is a serious limitation.

It also struck me as odd that while every hero comes with a villain option, no villains come with hero options. This is particularly strange since it describes an alternate universe you might want to try adventuring in, where heroes are evil and villains are good.

In Conclusion
This is a splendid supplement and a great addition to any superhero GM's arsenal. Whether you're just getting started or you already have a well-established game, it plugs in smoothly to most campaigns. Even if you aren't a DM, it's enough fun to buy just for the pleasure of reading it. The price may seem a little high for what isn't really a core book, but it's well worth it.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Jeez, did I really say "...where herpes are evil and villains are good?" My apologies. I meant to say "where heroes are evil..." etc. Herpes are of course always eveil, no matter what dimension you're in.

 

[Psion]

You can use the edit icon at the bottom of the review to edit it. Other than typos, I must say your formatting needs some work, as your line breaks are rather distracting.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Hey, great! Thanks for the tip, I'll go make the changes you suggested.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Freedom City is a campaign setting for the Mutans & Masterminds OGL game form Green Ronin, designed by Steve Kenson. It’s 192 pages of full color glory on slick pages with design handled by Super Unicorn. Interior art is handled by Greg Kirkpatrick, Dan Panosian, Ramon Perez, and Craig A. Taillefer. The artists do a fantastic job here. They make the book seem more graphic novel than role playing supplement.

The layout is two-column and uses color to denote special notes. The top of the page is a full color border with the chapter number at the end with the chapter title on the interior. For example, if I flip to page 70, I see chapter five, life in Freedom City.

Freedom City is broken up into Seven Chapters with a separate section for Heroes and Villains. The first six-chapter focus on Freedom City. By breaking it into separate chapters, it allows a GM to look for specific things of one topic. Navigating the book, thanks to the three-page table of contents, that lists each subsection and it’s page number, is vastly easy, almost making up for the lack of an index.

The first chapter is standard stuff. Premises, history, and ideas on how to use history in a campaign. These aren’t detailed notes about how Freedom City did this or that through the years, but it does provide the GM with enough information to think about using it in a historical theme. The timeline starts at well, prehistory, and moves into some really old times that are so ancient that they’ll really only mean something if you’re doing something like the Eternals. The city was founded properly in 1630 and the timeline leads us to nearly the end of 2002.

Each entry is a few sentences long and provides the GM with the general feel of the entry. For important events, such as World War II, we have a beefier section. One thing I enjoyed reading was how things were worked to reflect many of the changes in comics, going from the Golden Age to the Silver, and hinting at the more dangerous waters comics now flounder in.

Chapter Two, Freedeom City Overview, is more of an introduction to the city. This includes things like vital statistics, topography and climate, layout of the city, and an excellent breakdown of the areas of the city. This includes everything from Downtown and the Boardwalk, to Midtown and the Theatre District. Each section is brief, but includes place of interest, each place with the actual page number. For example, if you read about the City Center, you’ll see entries for City Hall, Federal Plaza, Freedom Hall, Freedom Public Library, and the Pinnacle Path Headquarters.

One of the enjoyable features of the book are the True Super Stories scattered throughout it. These little stories give the city character and life. While not quite up to a graphic novel collection of Astro City, they do allow you to get a good feel for the setting and see how the fantastic interacts with the mundane.

Other chapters have a deeper focus. Chapter Three, Government, provides a quick run down of City Hall, the current Mayor, City Council, and other factors. Chapter Four, Public Safety, includes material on Law Enforcement, Emergency Service, and the Judical and Penal Systems. Chapter Five, one of the largest, Life in Freedom City, is where the GM can start to quickly see how a campaign can come together, where ideas can be fleshed out. These range from noting where the public and private schools are, to where the museums are. From what papers are printed in the city, to what the local military force is doing here. Looking to give the players a night on the twon with a good restaurant and music scene? It’s covered. Many of the sections have a sidebar on Campaign Use to make it even easier for a new GM to determine how best to use these resources.

Getting a separate chapter, The Underworld includes information on the drug scene, including statistics for mobsters, as well as designer drugs. It’s perhaps a little too short and doesn’t go into enough detail but it does provide the reader with a few streegangs, as well as information on the larger organizations like the Triads and Yakuza. No Dark Champions here though!

While the main thrust of the book is in Freedom City and it’s history, it goes far beyond that. Chapter Seven, actually called Beyond Freedom City, includes different areas of interest by local. On Earth for example, we have Atlantis, Kaiju (Monster) Island, Lost World, Sub-Terra, and Utopia. Beyond Earth, we have Farside City, a tribute to the Inhumans of Old living on the Moon, as well as numerous organizations like the Grue Empire, the Lor Republic, and the Star Knights, who are another tribute to the Space Knights of old with their leader Rom.

Past that is a section on Other Dimensions. This includes an Anti-Earth, where good people are bad, Freeport City, that’s right, the fantasy version, the Terminus, a place where DC comic’s good old Anti-Monitor could come from, but instead we have Omega, one of, if not the, most powerful villain, in an official product.

For those looking to populate their world quickly, we have many samples in Chapter Eight, Heroes & Villains. Some of these are professional organizations of heroes like the Freedom League; while others are like that Fantastic Four of Marvel Super Hero fame in that their family first, as is the case with the Atom Family. Those not interested in whole teams have a range of individual heroes, most of them slotted to a specific genre. Looking for the resident mystic master? Say hello to Adrian Eldrich. Looking for someone to take down street crime? Seek out Foreshadow.

One of the things I love about these write ups, is that they feel very weighty. They include the standard stats, but those are very small in comparison with the rest of the text. Take Jonnhy Rocket. We get his background, a quote, personality, powers & tactics, appearance, campaign use, villain option, and his rogue’s gallery. This rounds out the characters far more than just having a set of statistics, and allows the GM to get double use out of every hero here if needed by having options for villainous behavior.

Of course heroes can’t be complete without villains. Some of these ranges from the Crime League, a semi-organization of super villains, to the Factor Four, rivals to the Atom Family who resemble the Fantastic Four a little more as they have a beam that uses fire and a brick that resembles an earth elemental. While Professor Fathom doesn’t stretch per say, he is water so he can mimic such tricks while Slyph is the air master, the only one without ability to fully mimic her counterpart.

I think one of the things I like about the book is how it pays homage to things that came before it while making it it’s own. Take Argo, an android designed to mimic super powers of those it studies. Can you say Amazo from DC comics? I knew you could. However, this android is stuck in his current form and while he has suffered defeat numerous times, he is currently in the Terminus, just waiting to be activated again. Can you smell campaign plot there? How about the Mastermind? A being that was there when a ship tore him apart and put him back together? Can you say Master of the World, one of Alpha Flight’s foes over and over?

My favorite character though, just because I know any campaign in which he shows up in is going to be at it’s peak form, it’s epic “Zero Hour” if you will, is Omega, Lord of the Terminus. He clocks in as a PL 24 individual whose powerful all around the board. Not only does have has a natural Strength of 20, but he has Cosmic Power with an extra Boost Strength of 18 or worse, Disintegration. Definitely someone you don’t want to mess with. The full page illustration of him striding forth is a great tribute to all those old powerful cosmic foes that have shown up in one form or another.

The book closes off with some tools including character sheet and full-page map of the city. This perhaps is the weak point of the city. Well, no, the weak point of the city is using the word Freedom in way too many of the things in the city. Outside that, there needs to be more maps of things like malls, shops, schools, and hospitals. The overview of the city is good, but could use a few more up-close views so that GMs can see how various neighborhoods start and stop.

To me, the book has lots of spark. It’s very easy to read. It’s very easy to use right away. Is it 100% original? I don’t think too many things in comics can be. Does it present itself well? Can I pick it up and use it in game play? Have I enjoyed being a player in this vibrant setting? The answer to all of those questions is yes. Freedom City may need to cut back to the various titling of all things with the word Freedom, but it’s a quality book that anyone looking for a setting for any supers campaign, should consider.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Freedom City is a setting for Mutants and Masterminds, penned by that game’s author, Steve Kenson.

I will open this review by saying right now that this is my favorite published campaign setting for any roleplaying game, ever. It is that good.

My favorite aspect amongst the many contenders in this 192-page tome is the fact that this is a content-rich product. While a miniscule number of pages are used for strictly design or non-game “flavour” reasons (a fond eulogy for a fictional Comic Publisher, entire pages with nothing besides “Welcome to…” and “Now Leaving…” street signs a’la Kurt Busiek’s Astro City etc.), the small font size used allows a great deal more information to be packed in than I would normally expect to find in a supplement this size.

“Content-rich” doesn’t actually tell the whole story here; Freedom City is content packed.

The first chapter outlines the history of the Freedom City setting starting at 500,000 BC (!) and describing the antediluvian “Empire of Serpent-men” that seems to rear its hooded, cult-leading head in most Green Ronin publications. Also appearing are the lost civilization of Atlantis, a Moon-dwelling offshoot of the human race and Extraterrestrial Aliens planting the seeds of human (and super-human) life throughout the galaxy, etc.

The next five (!) chapters go into painstaking detail on the city itself, outlining the major, neighbourhoods (all 26 of them), modes of transportation/traffic arteries, governmental functions and functionaries, Law Enforcement (and the law enforcers), Emergency services, businesses and their proprietors, culture, religion, politics….it goes on and on, but never devolves into anything dull, which I find surprising. Often, the more detail the authors of city supplements put into describing the day-to-day workings of their metropolis, the more I start to glaze over (San Angelo: City of Heroes had this effect on me in its first incarnation).

The small but detailed writeups of the personalities of virtually any member of the city the players may cross paths with go a long way toward bringing the city to life. These writeups are numerous, very readable and very informative glimpses into the personalities and lives of the folks they describe.

The Underworld chapter describes the mundane (for the most part) criminal element in Freedom City in the same loving detail the previous chapters did, detailing Drugs, The Mafia, Street Gangs and other unsavory organizations that prey upon the weak here.

Chapter seven outlines the world “outside of Freedom City” and includes a Island of Giant Monsters, a Lost World ruled by a Savage King, an Underground Empire of Morlocks, a “Mirror Dimension”, two Galacxy-spanning Empires, the last remnants of Atlantean civilization and….Freeport?!

And folks…we are not yet even halfway through the book.

The whole thing reads as if anything the author had ever read or heard of in all of comics history made it into this setting (which, I am led to believe, is not far off the truth.), and to be honest with you…the setting absolutely shines for it.

The homages to comic book history come fast and furious, some obvious (“The Claremont Academy” as a stand-in for the Xavier Academy of X-Men fame…Chris Claremont is one of the more beloved writers of the X-Men), to the sly/humorous (WJSA, a radios station playing “the oldies”…the JSA (Justice Society of America) is a golden age precursor to the modern “Super Team” concept).

The book is absolutely rife with such homages, and while I’ve heard that they are not to the taste of some folks, I find them a lot of fun as they remind me how nicely this product stands in for the non-forthcoming (dammit) Astro City RPG supplement.

The latter part of the book is comprised of character writeups.

58 of them.

Fifty-eight fully-statted out, extensively described and lavishly illustrated characters (13 more than the astonishing Crooks supplement released by this same publisher)…and this is not even a “characters” book. Did I mention that this is a content-packed supplement?

While not universally up to the standards set by the Crooks supplement, the characters here are well done, and certainly well-realized visually. My only complaints with the characters as presented is one that has plagued M&M products: the Stats given do not always sync up with what the flavour text leads one to expect. Witness Foreshadow; by all counts a really cool character cut from the same cloth as DC comics Batman. His precognition power is clearly described as having the uncontrolled Flaw

“…the events he sees come to pass unless he takes action to prevent them, he has no control over this aspect of his power…”

Yet in the stat block, his Precognition is not listed as being Uncontrolled.

These kinds of flaws are, by and large, nothing major, are easily fixed and certainly do not detract from my enjoyment of the product to any great degree, but considering how high the bar has been set by the rest of the product, it’s a shame that this of all places is where the ball is dropped.

The illustration meets the standards set by, well, every other Mutants and Masterminds product (which have only really been challenged in this category by Guardians of Order’s The Authority RPG). The map included in the back is available for free download at the publisher’s website. I’ve had my copy for awhile now and the binding seems as strong as ever…

In closing, I have no qualms about recommending this product highly.