Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds and Private Clubs

[Messageboard Golem]

Common Ground II

The Common Ground series continues...

The unique generation system returns with three new sites: Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds and Private Clubs.


With this tool and 5 minutes you can

Build a Site - Choose the map layout
Select NPCs - Assign roles, statistics
Design doors, locks, traps.

A must have tool for all DMs!

You provide the story, Common Ground handles mechanics. No random generation, yet hundreds of combinations possible. You design what fits your world.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Common Ground II
Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds and Private Clubs
Written by Jeff Colledge
Published by Bard’s Production
48 pages
$11.95

So what is Common ground? What’s it for? What’s it do? Common Ground is a series of books designed to help the game mastery quickly place fully populated locations that adventurers commonly run across into his game in less than fifteen minutes. It may not be the prettiest book but it definitely works.

The first book covered Churches, Inns and Merchants. This book takes up where the first one left off and provides the GM with the tables and stats to quickly generate guard towers, thieves’ guilds and private clubs. Now I know what a guard tower is and a thieves guild, but was at first a little concerned over what a private club was. How different could it be from an inn? Well, this covers more than merely an inn as the club can be anything from a adventure hall, casino, house of ill-repute, to well, a private club for the wealthy. It does this by asking a series of questions, and based on the questions, provides NPCs to staff the locations. The full color maps present the GM with a quick visual reference of what the building looks like.

Let’s take a quick run through the creation of a guard tower. I play in the Scarred Lands using the city of Mithril. Between Mithril and Mullis Town, here are several guard towers that prevent monsters from stalking the road. I start with deciding that the terrain is plains, the size if medium, and because its medium, it has 6-12 guards from and 1-2 patrol leaders and 1 commander. The good thing is that it provides the GM some options like double bunks so you can double the numbers. Then I choose the general alignment, race, gender and name for the NPCs. Lastly, I add the miscellaneous details, which includes doors, the hardness, break, and DC, locks and traps. Time taken? Less than fifteen minutes.

The Thieves’ Guild and Private Club provide a little more in the way of information due to their nature of being highly customizable and may actually take up to or even a little over fifteen minutes. For example, when choosing the size of the private club, it’ll tell you how many people are needed to have a club, as well as what the purpose of the club is proprietor, secondary personnel, spell casters, men-at-arms, tricksters, race, gender and name, and miscellaneous details

The full color maps span four pages with symbols that are easy to recognize. Each size has different representations. For example, Guard Tower Maps has A, B, and C styles for their small, medium, and large towers. Each map does have a number key but no map key. In most cases, the illustrations are clear enough that you don’t need a map key but this would’ve been nice. For example, what is that green stuff on level 2 or Large Guard Tower? The Thieves Guilds gets an extra page as this isn’t something that can really be put together in a few sections. Instead there are numerous rooms that can connect to one another with secret doors. The artists includes numerous underground passages as well, almost providing the GM with a complete dungeon map in the process.

One of the nice things about this book though is the little extra thrown into the quick generation mix. For example, under Private Clubs, you’ll find information on different types of drinks and how much they cost with variants based on the social level of the club itself. You’ll also find rules for gambling for those players who have a few gold coins weighing down their pouches. For thieves, you get a quick list of guild names broken into two columns like Silver, Fiery, Treasure, and Serpents, Daggers, and Skulls. By picking one name from each side, you get something like the Night Spiders or the Dark Hands. Works well when the old brain freeze hits.

The Instant worksheets themselves consist of three different sets, one for each encounter. For example, Instant Private Clubs has a section for Name, Size, Map, Purpose, Proprieter, Stab Blocks, Races, Secondary Personnel. The thieves’ guild is a two-page handout as it relies on more information than the others. As an extra-added bonus, there are extra worksheets that are perforated for quick use.

Many of the problems that plagued the first book are still here. The artwork is fairly low quality. The maps, while readable, have no legend and no encounter key. The encounter key may actually be one of the most important of the missing elements. Take a guard tower for example. Is the roof manned with some type of siege weapon? Wouldn’t know by the maps.

The layout suffers in a few arts where it almost looks like clip art was thrown in to take up space. The fact that most of the information under races is the exact same material is maddening as well. Here’s an opportunity to provide the GM with at the very least, dozens of names for humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings, and instead, we get many of the same names repeated over again in each section. If you’re going to repeat the information, at least just put it on a single page.

Good points? On the other hand, the book does use the interior covers. Nice space saving feature.The front interior is used for to cover the credits of the book and the back interior cover is used to cover the Open Game Content License. The fact that it has perforated worksheets is a bonus because it makes copying them much easier. I wonder if it’d be worth it to the company to sell pdf copies of these worksheets for a low price?

Common Ground II is superior to the first one though because it’s half again as large at the same price (48 vs. 32). It provides more options for customization. It does provide a method for quickly laying down a Guard Tower, or a Thieves Guild or a Private Club. It does provide extras to help bring out the spice in each area. The question here then, is will this be enough or will the art, layout, and information presented have to increase one more time? If you liked Common Ground I, you'll love Common Ground II.

 

[GameWyrd]

To be up front and keep this review in perspective, I didn’t much like Common Ground 1 and Common Ground 2 isn’t very different. I don’t think Common Ground 2 could have been very different, there wouldn’t have been much time for opinions expressed about Common Ground 1 to have worked their way into the writing of this sequel.

Common Ground II is a 48-paged soft back book that will set you back $11.95. It really is a softback book; the covers being more like that of a magazine than a book. The page texture is glossy and even more so in the centre of the book where there’s a colour plate of miniature floorplans. The glossy pages further the suggestion of a magazine than a book.

The premise is simple. Halfway through a roleplaying session your players will do something unexpected and you’ll have to throw together a location on the fly. The back of the book suggests that you can build one of the sites in Common Ground II in about five minutes. Given practise, I suspect you could. I don’t imagine this could be done while you, as the GM, are having an NPC talk to the players. If you’re lucky the players will have a heated debate and you’ve got photocopies of the worksheet handy then you might be able to sneak the creation in. Otherwise you’ll probably have to hint at a coffee break.

I’ve said I didn’t like Common Ground I but some people loved it. I suspect one of the reasons that the division was so pronounced was due to GMing style. If Common Ground covers the sort of area you’re a bit shaky on or the sort of location that you’d like to have some scribbled notes about before the characters start exploring then Common Ground could be of great assistance. On the other hand, if you could rattle off such a location without even blinking then you’ve no need for Common Ground. Common Ground II faces a serious problem then; Common Ground I covered all the most common locations first. Whereas CG1 covered temples, inns and shops, CG2 is left with… guard towers, thieves guilds and private clubs. I think you’re unlucky if you find yourself ever needing to wing a thieves guild but I suppose the other side of that same coin is having some help nearby might be all the more handy if you do.

The guard towers section is a little more expansive than it might first suggest. Guard towers are equivalent to ranger stations, small barracks and probably any similarly sized military structure as well as those towers along city walls. I’m glad that Bard’s Productions doesn’t suggest a GM might need help imagining what a tower might look like. Instead the quick creation rules here focus on the occupants of the tower - what their stats might be and how numerous they might be. The composition of the guards depends largely on the terrain type surrounding the structure and how many civilians they’re trying to protect. In typical high fantasy form those guards who live in a woodland/forest terrain are more used to battling nasties and surviving off the land and so tend to be a little bit better. To be as fair as I can to this particular section I really can’t imagine a GM needing to use it because they’ve hit a brick wall. I suppose new, very new, GMs might like to peek at the crowded stat-pages every now and then and may even do so while preparing for the game. As was sometimes the case with CG1 there’s a little gem of a by-the-way info box in the section that helps it claw back some worth. In the guard tower section there’s a half page box that quickly looks at overland movement rates. In just three tables it shows how far a party with different base speeds might walk in one hour or one day, a similar table for various types of mounts and then terrain modifiers. It’s a summary of the rules from the core rules but it’s the sort of information that I find to be a helpful summary and yet rarely summarised.

If you’re going to use the thieves guild section then you’ll really need to follow the advice in the introductory paragraph; read through it carefully and be sure you have a worksheet photocopied before time. These worksheets can be found at the back of the book and are designed so that you can quickly circle the options you’ve selected or scribble in suitable values. The key factor in the thieves guild is, again, it’s size. The level of the guild leader seems inevitably tied to this. You’ll then move through the steps, working out how many different locations the guild has an area in, sample NPC stats, numbers of thieves, numbers of enforcers and then swindlers. There are race modifications and miscellaneous notes at the end. Throughout the section there are info boxes with little bites of advice or help that I always find to be more helpful than the core text. The little chart summary of different types of poison seems to be especially helpful.

At this point in the book you’ll encounter the colourful mini floorplans. I think they’re too small to be used as actual floorplans though. Their best use seems to be to help the GM visualise the layout and size of various buildings. This is likely to be a loose visualisation at best since the plans are with any form of legend.

The last of the three areas of common ground that’s covered in the book is that of private clubs. CG1 already covered taverns and I think a private club is pretty much the same. The pattern in the same here; work out the size of the club, how many people might be working there, their key roles and then stats. It’s a good thing that the procedure is similar in every chapter because it gets you in the habit and practise of filling out the worksheets. Yet again it’s the info boxes with little clips of game rules and suggestions that save the section. Examples of this include the cost for drinks and suggestions for in game gambling fixes.

Common Ground 2 is better than Common Ground 1 even though CG1 got to the key locations first. CG2 has a notable value for price superiority given that it’s about half as big again for the same cost. I said that CG2 feels a bit like a magazine but at least it doesn’t feel like a pamphlet. I still don’t see much value in trying to use these products during the course of the game... but this twists around to CG2’s favour, I think it can be used as a quick way to prepare locations the PCs /might/ visit and prepare them ahead of time. CG2 is better but it’s still not won me over and I still think it’s below par (if only slightly below par this time). I don’t know if there is going to be Common Ground 3 but if there is and it improves again on the same scale then it’s actually something I’m looking forward to reading. Oh dear; the pressure is already on.

* This GameWyrd review was first posted here.

 

[Psion]

Common Ground II: Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds, and Private Clubs

Common Ground II is a system made to quickly generate game statistics for a number of common establishments and their inhabitants.

A First Look

Common Ground II is a 48 page saddle-stitched softcover book priced at $11.95. The book is printed on slick paper.

The cover of the book depicts paper and writing implements against a wood backdrop as if you are viewing a desk.

Most of the book is black-and-white, and is limited to a few computer generated pictures of seals, wanted posters, glasses of wine, and the like. The center pull-out has color maps with a very small scale. The maps have a key but no legend or mention of scale.

The interior text is dense. The text is single column except for the statistics blocks, which are arranged into two columns.

A Deeper Look

As implied in the title, Common Ground II is a system for quickly creating a guard tower, a thieves' guild, or a private club. Each section is laid out in steps of a 5-8 step process. Generally the steps go:

- Choose size of the building and an appropriate map. The maps for all buildings are in the pull-out in the middle of the book.
- Choose type or purpose of building (e.g., type of terrain for a guard tower or purpose of a club)
- Choose appropriate NPCs from a number of categories. For example, the thieves' guild section has stat blocks for leader thieves, base thieves, enforcers, and swindlers. Each has a letter designation, and depending on the size of the guild, the user is directed to choose a number of thieves from each category.
- Choose alignment, race, and name for each character. A summary of racial details is included for each core race, including a pre-selection of bonus skills and feats for humans unique to each section.
- Add miscellaneous details. This includes sundry details of the building such as statistics for doors, locks, and traps.

The bulk of the book seems to be a number of stock NPC stat blocks, which you are directed to use by the step-by-step instructions. The stat blocks are complete with standard combat statistics, skills, and equipment (including magical equipment.)

The book had a few sidebar with additional embellishments and ideas for each type of establishment, such as drink prices, gambling game rules, poisons and other details regarding the establishment.

The end of the book has worksheets for each type of building. There are two copies of each sheet, one perforated for removal and one not. The sheets have blanks and have listing of letters (corresponding to a particular stat block in the book), gender, and race, as well as a few blanks for name, and combat statistics. I found this a bit wasteful, as it would take less room to jot the race and stat block letter down than to circle it. Further, I found the second set of pages wasteful as they are printed on slick paper that is difficult to write on with a pencil, meaning that you are likely to photocopy them anyways.

Conclusion

This is a nice little supplement, enabling you to generate establishments complete with statistics blocks rather quickly. This is of good utility if you expect to use these types of establishments frequently and have a combat oriented game. In a more typical game, however, you may find the book of a bit lower utility, as the stat blocks only tell you so much, and some ideas or inspiration for individuals might have been useful for less combative PCs visiting many locales with swords sheathed.

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Simon Collins]

This is not a playtest review.

Common Ground II: Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds and Private Clubs, is the second in a series from Bard's Productions offering a fast generation system for buildings and their occupants.

Common Ground II comes in at $11.95 for 48 pages. This is a significant page increase over Common Ground I (which was 32 pages for the same price). In addition to this, the strength of the cover used seems significantly improved, though it is still staplebound. The new price per page brings it into the same ballpark as other 48-page accessories. Space usage is pretty good. Both inside covers are used (for OGL and credits), font size is good (though the overall appearance can be somewhat cramped at times), margins are average, and there is little wasted space (1 full page ad). The internal mono computer-generated art is average, as is the colour cover. There is a central 4-page set of colour maps for each of the location types covered - these are of good quality but there is no scale designated. The writing style is concise and workmanlike, whilst editing is average, with occasional but regular mistakes (including a missing word on a section header - doh!).

Like Common Ground I, the sequel offers a restricted set of choices for quickly generating a building and its occupants. This uses a step-by-step choice mechanism, not random generation.

Section I: Guard Towers
1. Determine Terrain Type - 3 options with points to note and a sidebar detailing travel arrangements and overland movement rates.
2. Size and Map of Guard Tower Structure - 3 options with advice, linked to maps in central map sheet.
3/4/5. Choose NPC Stats for location occupants dependent on terrain type and size. Lists of generic pre-generated NPC stat blocks.
6. Alignment, race, gender, and name choices for NPCs. Stat modifiers and name lists given.
7. Stats for doors, locks and traps for the building.

Section II: Thieves Guilds
1. Choose size - gives advice on numbers and type of occupants dependent on size.
2. Choose maps - dependent on size, the appropriate map. Also information on traps with some nice sample trap triggers and examples of passwords.
3. Stat blocks for Guild leaders and senior thieves. A sidebar discussing good-aligned guilds.
4. Guild's base thieves stat blocks and some ideas for the name of the thieves guild.
5. Guild Enforcer stat blocks, with sidebars on street gangs and the use of a variety of races for thieves guild members.
6. Swindler stat blocks, with a note on why high-level NPCs are not available for choice (they can disrupt the logic of a campaign setting when created on the fly).
7. Alignment, race, gender, and name choices for NPCs. Stat modifiers and name lists given. There is also a sidebar with stats for 11 new poisons.
8. Stats for doors, locks and traps for the building.

Section III: Private Clubs
We're talking adventurer guild halls, casinos, bordellos, as well as private clubs.
1. Choose size and map.
2. Choose purpose (guild house/entertainment facility).
3. Proprietor and secondary personnel stat blocks - advice on assigning positions/professions. Also stat blocks for 'normals', spellcasters, men-at-arms (with a sidebar about bribes), and tricksters (with a note on hidden skills of NPCs).
4. Race, Gender, and Name for NPCs. Stat modifiers and name lists given. There is also a sidebar with some menu price suggestions.
5. Stats for doors, locks and traps for the building. There is also a useful sidebar dealing with gambling.

The remainder of the accessory gives worksheets for recording the choices you make as you create locations and NPCs on the fly for the three different areas.

Conclusion:
Like Common Ground I, the major problem with this accessory is the time taken out of a 'live' game to create these locations and their NPCs. This is supposed to be the major use of the accessory, but I just can't see my players hanging around for 5 minutes (a real 5 minutes) whilst I track through the book creating what amounts to a fairly well detailed thieves guild, private club or guard tower. If this was a computerised program, it might be possible to create something quickly enough to not interfere with the flow of the game.

I also noticed a couple of problems with stat blocks for the NPCs - if this is where the crux of the accessory lies, then the author should have made 110% sure there were no mistakes in these sections.

Like Common Ground I, this may be of some use to pre-game creation of these types of buildings, but there's nothing that any half-decent GM couldn't whip up in an hour. However, this accessory does allow you to significantly cut down the time that this would normally take. Better value in terms of content volume than Common Ground I, but I still question the overall value for money of this type of product, particularly in terms of its stated use.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By Steven Creech, Exec. Chairman, d20 Magazine Rack

Sizing Up the Target
Common Ground II: Guard Towers, Thieves Guilds and Private Clubs is the sophmore effort of Bard’s Productions. Written by Jeff Colledge, this 48-page book retails for $11.95. Common Ground II follows in the tradition of its predecessor by providing the means to quickly generate locales for mid-game encounters.

First Blood
Again, in theory, you should be able to use a specially prepared worksheet and generate a specific locale for encounters in about 5 minutes. The guard tower section contains sufficient stats to create, place and arm the tower with NPCs along with providing stats for doors, locks and traps. Equally, the necessary information exists for creating a thieves guild and a private club.

Critical Hits
For the most part, 5 minutes is just about right for the guard tower and private club. The thieves guild did take longer, however, but only by a few more minutes. I created a guild in about 10 minutes, which if you think about it, is still shorter than most group gaming breaks/bathroom runs. The guild name generator, ability to quickly create street gangs and the new poisons are all nice touches.

Critical Misses
Again, the maps, while nicely done, are still too small. If they were drawn to standard scale, a GM wouldn’t lose precious time duplicating them on a battlemat. (How about a web enhancement that fixes this issue guys?)

Coup de Grace
Common Ground II does exactly as promised, but again, the novice will find this a better value and more useful than the experienced GM who can improvise easily enough.

To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.