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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010352" data-attributes="member: 172">Freedom CityFreedom 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 LookFreedom 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 LookFreedom 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.ConclusionFreedom 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</blockquote>

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