Masterwork Maps: Urban Designs - New Glory Naval Base

[Brian K. Moseley]

In an era of demilitarization and downscaling, New Glory Naval Base has been lucky to survive. Now life returns to it, brushing away years of inactivity and abandonment. New facilities fill buildings long empty. The hillside tunnels remain officially closed, yet military freight carriers arrive daily. The hum of armored vehicles echoes through the woods, gunfire pierces the night, and old sailors warn that the ghosts of New Glory have never been known to be quiet. It is a new age for the relic of the past, and something stirs deep with it.

New Glory Naval Base is an extensive, highly detailed military and scientific installation complete with d20 System(tm) characters, unusual twists and turns, a long and colorful history, and a healthy dose of the unexpected – and sometimes unexplainable. New Glory provides an intricate background that maximizes reusability for adventures in multiple campaign themes while simultaneously serving as a recurring focal point of interest. This completely self-contained modular accessory is an intriguing and invaluable addition to contemporary roleplaying games.

Contents Include:
* Aerial map of New Glory Naval Base.
* Underground map of New Glory Naval Base.
* Highly detailed grayscale floor plans.
* d20 System(tm) modern personalities.
* Military routines and patrols.
* Furnishings and building structure information.
* Concisely described buildings and areas.
* Civilian and military points of interest.
* Colorful, extensive civilian and military background and interaction.
* Secret locations and adventure hooks.

 

[GameWyrd]

Just a little disclaimer to begin with; this review is based off a PDF copy of Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base and the New Glory Navy Base you’ll buy will be a paper product. What does this mean? Very little. I’ve seen PDF copies of print products before and know what, if anything, is likely to distort the fairness of the review. In the worst case scenario the printed version of New Glory Navy Base ends up on tissue paper or is missing a page – but that’s unlikely. This is especially unlikely since Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base is a Darkfuries RPG product and that’s a company I associate with perfection and meticulous planning.

Darkfuries publishes RPG cartography; floor plans especially, and this presents me with the single biggest challenge in this review. What is Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base? The keystone to any GameWyrd review is the measure between what the product promises to deliver and what it actually manages to deliver. New Glory Navy Base could be an adventure with a formidable collection of maps. On the other hand, this edition of Urban Designs might equally be a highly focused cartography collection given the additional perk of being packaged alongside an adventure.

I see Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base as a cartography product. That’s what Darkfuries do. Darkfuries excels at cartography. Experienced GMs use Darkfuries’ floor plans. Okay. New Glory Navy Base is as focused as it sounds; you’ve floor plans applicable to a US naval base – but you’ve a great selection of them.

You’ve a two paged Aerial Map of the base and the scale of this birds’ eye view is just perfect; you’ve room to clearly mark the naval buildings and room enough to include the surrounding cityscape and landscape. The buildings are marked with a three or four digit code. You can tell the general function of the room by just looking at the code (how very naval) and this is ideal for a GM in a rush. The inclusion of the nearby city and landscape is important too since the product’s 96 pages includes plot and NPCs from here too.

You have floor plans of all the penitent labelled buildings and their levels. Darkfuries floor plans are line drawings in what I imagine as an "architect style". Tables and chairs are marked on the map, as are the arcs of opening doors and the map grid suitable for the d20, and other, square based combat systems.

When it’s necessary for completeness (I did say Darkfuries was one for perfection) landscape areas are given the "building treatment" and drawn out in a similar style and scale. We’ve trees and bushes instead of tables and munitions stores marked on the grid in these cases.

There’s more than just a map for each location. There’s an extensive description too. Buildings have names and if you can’t find their building code on the two pages of birds’ eye view map then you can check their location from the description. The Hillside Sentry Post can be found at M1 on the Aerial Map, for example. We also have a note when the Sentry point is in operation and how many personnel staff it. We’ve the naval grading for these personnel too. The naval grading codes are explained elsewhere in the book too! We know what rank the OIC is (Officer in Charge, ah, see how I talk as if I knew all about the US navy already) and details about the Watch. We know if there’s a telephone junction box or an electrical power panel available too. We know if there’s any ventilation and, if so, what the physical specifications are. Urban Designs tells us what the construction materials are and what added security features might be present. In fact, I can safely say that there’s more detail than you would ever need to know about every listed building in the product. All this is in addition to the extra information about the location; it’s history, who has keys for the doors, which roads connect to it and where they go. I fancy my chances of bluffing my way onto CNN as a civilian expert on the US Navy security if I could just memorise all of this.

I’m not sure I want to memorise all of this though. It’s all well and good having this impressive array of detail available – but do I want it? Yes and no, I suppose, but mainly no. There’s too much detail here. I’d probably decide that a building or outpost has a telephone exchange as and when the plot, pace and tension suggested it would be a good idea to have that option available. That’s a personal choice and one made to suit my GMing style though, other GMs may well strive to be as accurate as possible and I’m sure all GMs would happily take the option of having all the detail at hand and being able to cherry pick from it. Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base certainly gives the reader the latter.

Already noted is the handy square map grid. This suits the d20 battle grid, specifically it suits d20 modern. New Glory Navy Base is a d20 modern product. You can use the maps and the impressive detail for any modern setting game but Urban Designs includes NPCs (officers to criminals) and they’re statted for d20 modern.

New Glory Navy Base could be anywhere. That’s the plan. You just need to have an excuse to have an old naval base at hand. I think we can safely assume we’re talking about a costal city. Implicitly we’re also talking about an American city since the structure of the New Glory Navy Base matches the US Navy although the base itself isn’t so large that you couldn’t imagine it was a foreign outpost somewhere. If you did decide to go with the foreign outpost then you’d probably also have to ignore the background that the book provides from New Glory and invent your own too. The Darkfuries supplied background is good enough not to re-invent unless you have to.

Oh. Um. Given that there are elements of adventure in the product you should turn away now (and buy something through the shopping links instead) if you’re worried about spoilers.

Actually, there isn’t much to spoil for the base’s background but I dare say players will prefer to discover the details themselves especially in the face of a possible haunting. One of New Glory’s surprise successes is the "possible haunting". It’s up to you. If you’re running a d20 modern game with ghosts and goblins then you can go with the supernatural route. If you’re playing a strictly real or otherwise low FX modern game then the plot only involves drug smugglers. Excellent. It is with this criminal element that New Glory begins to chain together as an adventure. There are criminal dealings in the base; one of the officers isn’t as loyal to Uncle Sam as could be. There are gangs and crimelords in the district outside. What do you expect? Where there are sailors there are bound to be dance clubs too.

Even after I settle on describing New Glory Navy Base as a cartography product with added plot I still find it hard to address in a review. There’s no question, I feel, that the product is of excellent quality, that its attention to detail is impressive and the mapwork superb. I’m just not sure how useful an exactly detailed US Navy base is for me (even one that tries to be as generic as possible). I suppose that if I wanted to run an adventure or even campaign in or around a US Navy base then New Glory would be invaluable for me. It takes a second look at the stalwart golden rule of "Does it do what it says on the tin" to help me finalise the review. Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base promises all the cartography you need for a naval base and supplies that without question and without shortcomings. As an addition, as a bonus, there are the plot threads which loop through the base and this takes the RPG product from the passing B grade to the added extra A grade.

Urban Designs: New Glory Navy Base will most appeal to those gamers who like to play in military adventures and who like the details to be as precisely accurate as possible.

* This New Glory Naval Base review was first published at GameWyrd.

 

[Psion]

Masterwork Maps: New Glory Naval Base

New Glory Naval Base is a book in Darkfuries new Masterwork Maps line of print products, presenting a modern naval base for use in a d20 Modern campaign. Darkfuries is responsible for a number of electronic map products, such as Castles & Keeps, Mansions & Manors, and Inns & Taverns. These products are of such universal use that I use at least one of them in 90% of my d20 fantasy sessions. It should be interesting to see both how their products fare in print and how well they support d20 Modern.

Further, as I have worked on Naval bases all of my gainfully employed life, it should be interesting to see how Darkfuries fares.

The writing in the book is attributed to M.K. McArtor, Robert Nolan, and Dave Woodrum. The maps are by Brian Mosely.

A First Look

New Glory Naval Base is a 96 page perfect bound softcover book available for $19.95.

The cover has a grey concrete like texture to it. The front is adorned with a color version of one of the interior maps.

The interior is black and white with art by Shafali Anand, David Cummings, Steven Grover, Kevin Sandborn, and Chuck Whelon. The art is mostly low detail ink drawings of individuals, but the majority of the graphical adornment is the maps themselves.

A Deeper Look

The vast majority of the book is concerned with the various buildings of a fictional US Naval base called the New Glory Naval Base. This base is about on the order of a small naval base like the Everett naval station.

The first chapter is a brief introduction, including the history of the base and the landowner who originally owned the land, told from the vantage point of a newspaper article. The introduction also lays down a few basic concepts used in the book, like naval ranks and watch rotations. The only map in this chapter is an overview of the base, showing all building locations and numbers. One thing I noticed right off the bat was that the street names and building numbers have a very realistic veneer to them.

Chapters 2 through 6 describe the various sorts of buildings on the base: Security & Munitions, Command & Operations, Facilities Ashore, Logistics & Support, and Services & Recreation.

Each of these chapter features multiple buildings. There are multiple building maps in each chapter, but in some cases, the same building is uses several times. This is fairly realistic, especially when you are talking about general purpose buildings like barracks. That said, the barracks depicted herein range from much more posh that I am used to (with 60 man open bays, which I have only ever seen in boot camp) to a little posh by naval standards (with long interior hallways like a nice hotel; in reality most barracks I have seen only have small hallways linking groups of 5 rooms and have bays leading to outdoor walkways and stairwells like a cheap motel.)

The maps are set up a bit like the ESD map products by darkfuries: each map has detailed descriptions of facilities and features. The details listed for each of these include a watch rotation and details of which and how many personnel are in the building at various hours, locations of telephone and power boxes, construction, ventilation, security features (including statistics for locks), and room descriptions and contents.

The maps themselves are very nice, using a standard d20 system style 5-foot grid. The maps are adorned with notations that make it appear like a realistic draftsman's blueprint of the building. This is nice if you want to copy the map and use it as a prop to hand to the players. Unfortunately, the book provides no permission to copy for personal use for those with a deep conscience for copyright issue or that must deal with paranoid copy shop clerks. In addition, the title of the building is not on the sheet, just a building number; as some descriptions are displaced from the same page as the map, it may take a little hunting to get the map that you want. It seems as if it would have been prudent to put a label outside of the frame so you could nkow what you are looking at at a glance, and still retain the "prop-utility."

The assortment of buildings described here can be described in one of two ways - "realistic" or "mundane." There are no psychic research centers or nuclear weapon storage facilities. This makes things a bit more difficult if that's what you want out of a book about naval installations. But if you are comfortable setting your scenario amongst barracks, administrative buildings, naval exchanges, pierside maintenance shops, and armories that are more the realistic norm for such an installation, then you should find the buildings useful. Further, the selection means that you can take some of them and present them as civilian buildings such as a police department armory or a civilian department store.

The seventh chapter, Roll Call, is where (aside from various security details) most of the d20 Modern material in this book lies. There are about 6 pages of supporting characters on the base, including Naval personnel and civilians in the surrounding community. All of the NPCs are ordinaries using the d20 Modern rules. There is also a exotic dancer nightclub in this chapter, the sort where you might find young naval personnel.

Conclusions

As mentioned, I though there were a few ways that the book could have been made more readable and improved the utility of the book, such as making building labels clearer.

That said, the maps themselves are certainly high quality and potentially useful, and most details strike me as reasonable and realistic for a base of this sort. The only thing I might have added is a few more adventure ideas or a campaign setups to help the GM make use of the base.

Overall Grade: B-

-Alan D. Kohler