The New World has a Gazetteer
Northern Crown
The Gazetteer
Stock Number AG3711
ISBN 1-58978-078-7
Written by Doug Anderson
Published by Atlas Games
160 b & w pages
$29.99
The second part of the Northern Crown series, the Gazetteer handles all the things that New World Adventurers didn’t have space to contain. This includes more details on the lands, monsters, adventures, plot hooks, and statistics for major NPCs.
Like the first book, this one is slightly overpriced when comparing it to other d20 hard covers. It’s short page count and black and white art put it in a difficult place. Even more true if you consider that both books have an increased use when used together, a gestalt effect, requiring an extra output of cash. The art is fair, but not the top in the d20 industry. Unlike the New World Adventurers, this one uses two-column format. The editing is good in that no obvious mistakes jumped up at me.
The Gazetteer is broken up into ten chapters, each one covering a specific piece of information. The introduction provides a detailed timeline, starting at 10,000 BCE and ending with the modern day, 1666. The timeline is a little more advanced them merely a note, having enough information to give the read a good indication of chronological events and their importance.
Those looking to jump right into adventures will find chapter two covers them nicely. Broken up into different types, for example, under exploration and discovery, you’ll find seeds ranging from discovering King Arthur’s resting place, to the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. The scenarios include the set up in terms of background, as well as three possible levels of truth. It can either be half-true, true, or beyond true, where the idea is taken to the next level. For example, Arthur’s Rest has Arthur dead, sleeping in a cave in the Mountains of Smoke, or already awake and planning on taking the throne of Carolingia from Charles II.
In addition to the adventure seeds, things that commonly happen to adventurers, like encountering diseases, and poisons, are listed. New diseases like Flux join new poisons like White snakeroot. Other bits, including how the Uropanian and First Ones wage war, is included with knightly orders and honors. Not everything is always done up in arms though, and several cults, including the Hellfire Club and The Order of the Temple of Solomon, provide more adventure hooks. Can the party stop the members of the Weeping Eye from leaving their grisly trophies to their foul altar? Can the infiltrate the Sons of Cincinnatus and see what their plans for the Republic of Sophia are? Lots of great ideas scattered through this chapter.
On the other hand, those who merely love tables, will find chapter three, Environments, right up their alley. Page after page of encounter tables dictated by % dice, with day and night listings. Each includes the roll, encounter, number of creatures encountered, CR, and potential EL. In addition, details about the landscape are included. Useful chapter but it takes up its share of pages.
While New World Adventures provided cultural details on the various inhabitants of Northern Crown, it didn’t do a lot for the details of the countries of those cultures. That’s where chapter four, Nations, picks up. Listed in alphabetical order, the nations include statndard details, like proper name, ruler, government type, capital, major towns, with populations, imports, exports, trade, population (break down of cultures), army, navy, languages, religion, allies, and enemies. This stat block is then followed by an overview, history, conflicts and intrigues. These are not in depth details, but provide the GM with a grounding on the countries, and the conflicts and intrigues section provides even more adventure seeds for the GM to weave into his own campaign.
For example, if the GM wants a game with intrigue, the Republic of Sophia is engaged with Carolingia, each side using spies and infiltrators to hinder the other. Perhaps the characters hear about how Vinland has offered it’s services to the Witchlings of Naumkeag and for cash, will gladly help them destroy the Commonwealth.
While the world isn’t heavily covered, there are some brief details about the Uropan powers and the Powers of the Far East. These are almost foot notes for the latter, and while it’s good to see the fey queen Gloriana rule Albion, more details would’ve been nice. Hopefully if the line does well, we’ll actually see a sourcebook on Albion and the other Uropan powers.
After describing the countries, the book takes a step back in chapter five to show us the actual Gazetteer. The setting is broken up into four sections, west and east Algonkia, west and east Appalachia. Each map is blown up with water routes, roads, paths, and starts marking a gazetteer entry. This allows the reader to look at each different map and see what new details can be found there.
Each gazetteer entry includes environment, description, and background. These are not just spots to represent strange wilderness environments, but also towns, castles, and duchies. The description is written to be read aloud to characters who are there, while the background provides a quick paragraph or three on the history of the location. Some of the entries look like they were penned in for completeness sake, and others like the Golden’s Isle, have much more detail allowing the GM to do more with it. Others however, will like the brief entries as it allows them to customize those locations quicker.
Many new settings offer new challenges. Sometimes it is a new disease or poison, often times though, the GM wants to see the monsters. Chapter six starts off by describing how existing monsters fits into the Northern Crown setting. For some, like angels, this includes a name change and a Angelic rank. For most though, it’s simply an entry that describes what changes, if any, to make. For example, griffons are thought to be in the deserts and mountaints of the Far East, but haven’t been seen in Northern Grown. Halflings are a dwindling Uropan race, while elves are humans known as the tuatha de danaan that have taken refuge in Faerie. As a nice surprise, the Penumbra Bestiary monsters that are appropriate are also mentioned, but they don’t get the extra details that the core monsters do.
New creatures are first listed by type and subtype, then by challenge rating, before going into the actual details. Creatures range from a CR 1, like the Haint, to a CR 20, like the Gougou. In terms of game stats, most are okay, but it seems that whenever a size adjustment was made, instead of making it to the attack and full attack, the adjustment is made to the bab and grapple roll. For the most part, this is okay as it is then taken into account on the attack and full attack, but it does throw off the grapple checks, which makes it a little harder for large creatures to grapple. A few other errors, like the Bone Dancer having an initiative of 8, instead of 6, and some missing feats for some magical beasts, and some damage bonuses that seem off, crop up, but overall, I’ve seen much worse.
In terms of use, there is a slight focus on magical beasts and animals. This includes things like the dread rattler, a powerful reptile with poison and swallow whole abilities, as well as the misig’nwa, a hunting spirit that takes the form of a huge bear. Some classics are also presented like the Haunted Scarecrow and the Headless Rider. In addition, I know that there are several d20 fans looking for more standard animals. Well, you should be happy with offerings like the giant beaver, moose, and panther, among many entries.
For rewarding characters, one thing that players love is treasure. Chapter seven covers that with table breakdowns for gems, art objects, mundane items, and magic items grouped with inventions. It’s a short chapter that leads directly into chapter eight, magic itmes.
Here we have the variants that the First Ones use. For example, First Ones don’t use rings, they use tattoos. In addition, they don’t use scrolls, but rather sacred chants. The section includes different names and changes to standard items. For example, the adamantine battleaxe is a club known as a starmetal club. The holy avenger is a shortspear called the spear of the pniese. It’s an interesting section, but I think that they give the First Ones too high an advantage if you’re going to mix standard d20 characters with the First One. Who wouldn’t want a permanent tattoo that functions exactly as a magic ring and can’t be removed? Sure, it prevents you from switching rings out but that’s a small price to pay, especially if you have a unique of powerful tattoo. Thankfully they do note that the tattoo takes up the same magic slot as a ring, which is good for game balance, but doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense outside of balance.
Uropan items are also described with their modifications. For example, elven chain is fey armor, and mitrhal shirts as known as mercurial cuirass. There aren’t a lot of brand new items, but we do have a few minor artifacts and major artifacts. For example, spellcasters, except for witches, can’t use certain summoning spells. To compensate for that, there is the Black Book, the one with those spells including planar ally, planar binding, and other summoning spells.
Those wondering about the technology level and what wondrous inventions are in store, have chapter nine to look forward to. Inventions are listed by science and minimum inventor level. The sciences include things like antimagic and magnetism, as well as matter and mentalism, among others. Inventions have their own statistics including size, type, hp, hardness and break DC, inventor level, price, and weight. Inventions include air vehicles like the aerial helix, a helix shaped sial mounted on a revolving gear, to electrostatic gunlocks, that prevent any chance of misfire normally associated with gunpowerded weapons. It’s a nice mix of the weird and pulp and would be at home in any Swasbuckling Adventurers style game as well as Northern Crown.
With a setting based loosely on North America, it’s fitting that chapter ten brings the non-player characters to life. It starts off with living legends, those well known by the Northern Crown inhabitants, and then moves onto stock NPCs. Both are useful for different reasons.
The book is low on the role playing notes for the Living Legends, and doesn’t go into a lot of background. For example, Johnny Appleseed has his full game stats listed out, and two paragraphs of background, followed by his special abilities, including culture abilities, class abilities, and possessions. Useful but some adventure seeds for actually using old Johnny, as well as more background details, would be just as useful. The stock NPCs cover a wide variety of types, including bandits, greatsword users, highwaymen, musketeers, and pirates.
For the appendices, we start off with the bibliography, then the open game license, then the two page index. For those publishers which insist on not putting an index in their books, I urge you to see how useful an index is, especially one as useful as this. I’ve seen indexes that were basically worthless, acting almost like a table of contents. This one works.
Northern Crown has a lot of potential. There are some great gems that can be snagged for any campaign, such as with the inventions, monsters, poisons and diseases. The background details are useful for those interested in a Northern Crown game, fit for many game sessions for the GM willing to take the adventure seeds and work them into his own campaign. Northern Crown is not the typical fantasy game, nor is it the typical historical supplement, blending elements of the fantastic into it’s roots.
For those tired of standard settings like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, Northern Crown makes a good change of pace.
