I got mine the other day at my FLGS. City of Brass is truly awesome! Nice to see that Necromancer is supplying us with the first decent Planescape product since that line got canceled.
First thing I noticed is that the box has no empty space--it is filled top to bottom with books. A hefty product. I certainly feel I am getting my money's worth!
The books themselves are very detailed and I think I will be mining them for years for details and ideas for campaign seeds. There's definitely a lot to read. Lots of good stuff inside.
The locations book details all the interesting locations, shops and palaces in the city. They are richly detailed and wonderfully conceived. Eminently suited for a city of Efreet on the plane of fire, but if you needed ideas for shops or locations to populate another planar city, say somewhere in Hell or the Abyss or the other lower planes, or maybe a genie city in one of the Elemental Planes, there is plenty of excellent material here to mine that would port over and could be easily used for a DM needing ideas.
The adventures book is a lot of fun to read. I haven't read it all just yet, but a wealth of ideas are found within. Enough to make a whole campaign out of this box-set. You could easily level a party up from 1-20 levels several times over with everything in here. Most DM's will probably just want to have their players cruise through on one or two adventures, and if so, your players are in for a treat. But if a DM is running a planar campaign, the City of Brass would make for an excellent hub of operations or home base for the adventurers, a great place to come home to after adventuring out to adventure among the planes. Lots of places to shop, train and have adventures and intrigue in the downtime between quests and such. Even if the PC's don't live there, the City would be a great place to come back to, time and time again to get supplies, search for information, and interact with all the nifty locations and characters.
The third book has a lot of wonderful monsters and NPC's. I lit up when I saw some of the old school monsters statted that have not been converted to 3.5e. Lots of creative new monsters too. The art is also very nice! The NPC's look like they are a great time saver for a DM, as you can go to this book and select from a wealth of fully statted NPC's of every stripe and color. The NPC's are all very interesting too.
The map book is very nice as well. I like all the little details and flourishes. Very pretty!
Will you offer a web enhancement for the book? I would certainly love to have jpegs or gifs or pdfs of the maps so that I could scale them up and print them out to use as battlemaps in my game.
I am very thrilled with my purchase and look forward to enjoying reading more of it and running my players through it soon. I have a couple of efreeti minis that are about to get a lot of use...
