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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010591" data-attributes="member: 172">Guilds and AdventurersGuilds and Adventurers is a sourcebook detailing guilds and similar professional groups for the d20 System by Mystic Eye Games. The book is nominally a Hunt: Rise of Evil supplement but is applicable with some adaptations to most standard d20 System fantasy settings.Guilds and Adventurers is written by Kenneth C. Shannon III, Ian Thompson, Doug Herring, Andrew Thompson, Andrew Hind, Wade Nudson, and Bret Boyd.A First LookGuilds and Adventurers is a 128-page perfect-bound softcover book priced at $19.99. This is a competitive price for a d20 System book of this size.The cover of the book, illustrated by Matt Bober, depicts a man and a woman working some sort of trade in a marketplace.The interior art is black and white and includes the talents of Jeremy McHugh, Alan Dyson, Chad Segesketter, Hunter Frederick McFalls, Doug Penney, and Brannon Hall. The art is of mediocre to good quality, with McHugh being one of the most definitive artists of the book.The book uses a san serif body text font like many Mystic Eye games product, which impairs readability somewhat. The lines and paragraphs are single spaced, but the font used is somewhat large, providing a smaller than optimal word count per page.A Deeper LookThere are two major sections of the book. Both sections detail guilds and similar organizations. The first section includes more mundane and familiar guilds like alchemists, beggars, merchants, and seafarers. The second section, entitled "Associtions, Societies, and Specialty Guilds", is a bit more detailed, providing more unique (and Gothos-specific) guilds such as the lottery (an assassins guild that collects dues and dispenses assassins based on fees collected from various individuals who are willing to pay towards a fund to dispense with various hated individuals) and the second fiddle (a group of slacker artisans).The second section is a miniature "adventure" resource, with plot ideas and game mechanics, in a similar vein to Mystic Eye's Foul Locales series. In addition to the material included in the basic guilds, there are adventure hooks, NPCs, creatures, and prestige classes included with these guilds.The guilds share a basic format, which covers details such as a name, basic description, entry requirements, and dues.Another common aspect of the guilds are the classes used to define members. There are two new classes included common to most guilds, the guildsman prestige class and the guild expert NPC class. Both of these classes receive generic abilities in terms of guild ranks and guildsman abilities as they advance. These abilities are different for each guild and called out in the guild description, along with details such as class skills, bonus feats, and which skill their skill focus skill is in. This mechanic is fairly flexible and utilitarian. The one nitpick here is that the guildsman prestige class did not use a standard BAB advancement.One unusual mechanic that Mystic Eye uses to facilitate certain guilds (such as the adventurers and assassins guild) is synergistic advancement. Basically, guilds that use this option list a specific class. When a character advances a rank in their guild class, they use all of bonuses and abilities of their synergistic class instead of the guildsman or guild expert prestige class, but also gain the guild abilities and rank benefits of the guild at the appropriate level as well as class skills and bonus feat choices. The mechanics struck me as a little confusing, and considering some of the benefits of guild abilities, a little powerful. It seems as if using a mechanic a bit more like d20 Modern's starting occupations of Second World Sourcebook's background options would have been a more balanced and less confusing way to achieve a similar result.ConclusionOverall, I found this to be a fairly useful take on adding guilds to a world, and thought that the Guild Expert and Guildsman classes were a much more solid and mechanically compelling way to achieve guild specialized abilities than the rather ad hoc and method of Bastion's Guildcraft, which tries to circumvent the class system. Further, the adventure ideas and resource material in the second section were an unexpected treat.That said, I found the synergistic advancement mechanic troubling in that it seems both confusing to implement and as if the end result was unbalanced. Fortunately, only a few guilds use this mechanic and it seems possible to avoid their use in some cases.Overall Grade: C+-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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