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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2011696" data-attributes="member: 264">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.</blockquote>

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