Besides being the name of one of my
favorite songs by one of my
favorite
artists,
Seven
Cities is a sourcebook from
Atlas Games that details 7 generic cities (sort of - see below). It's softcover, 144 pages,
and reasonably priced at $21.95.
Seven Cities is actually a bit of a misnomer, at least the
cities
part. It actually details 7 communities of different sizes, starting with a Thorp and increasing in size up to Large City (as
defined in d20 terms). They really don't have all that much in common, except each is on a river. The same river, actually.
Each community has about the same number of pages devoted to it, around 20 (a bit less on average). You get a history of the
place, then some keyed entries, then lastly some plot hooks.
The book actually starts off with what seems like filler material - an overview of the different size categories, info on common
services and basics of how cities work, and common problems, like plague and fire.
In an interesting move, each larger community uses the keyed entries of the earlier ones in the book. So mos to of the
locations in the smaller communities appear in it as well.
I'm not really sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it lets the larger places be detailed. On the other hand, it means
that the thorpers (? thorpies? thorpistas? thorpeans?) will be in 7 different locations. It tells you to just change the names and use the stats, but that's largely worthless, as the book is very stat light. Most entries for stats are basically just class, level, and hp.
The best part of the book are the descriptions of the
inhabitants. The descriptions and personalities make them almost
come alive. But this often can't be reused, because they wouldn't
make as much sense in larger cities. For instance, in the Thorpe,
this one gnome young lady doesn't want to marry the only gnome
guy in town, and is afraid her parents will pressure her to. Now,
move that from the Thrope into something larger, where there
would be gnomes, and that no longer makes all that much sense.
The books is full of things like this that work in one setting,
but not the larger ones.
This is somewhat aggravated by the fact that as the size of the
communities get larger, the number of keyed entries (and info
about their specific inhabitants) gets fewer and fewer, as more
space is devoted to the history of the place. The largest one in
the book, the Large City, has only 8 entries specific to it. The
smallest communities have about 25-30 entries.
So, the small communities really shine, and are very well done.
But the larger ones are somewhat vague, and would require a lot
of work in drop in your campaign, and in some cases, have
somewhat complex histories that likely won't fit your campaign.
For instance, the Large City was founded by an elf Paladin/Wizard
called the Sun Lord (his proper name is forgotten despite the
fact he's apparently still around and living in the city), and he
constantly battles his nemsis, the Night Lady. It's very
comic-bookish in tone. Didn't fit my game, anyway.
But overall, the communities are all very well done, and while
some might require a bit of work, or altering to fit your game
(for instance, in the large city, the worst offender, it is easy
to drop the Sun Lord and his nemesis, since no one even knows
their names, how popular could they be?), and all of the
communities are pretty generic. Nothing weird like dragon men or
steam gnomes or ninja kobolds or Carribean pirates as found in
some supposedly generic city supplements.
It's something of a spartan looking book. There's not much art,
about 13 pieces in the whole book by my count (mostly good to
excellent, though). And while there are lots of maps, they're
pretty vague in style. While not quite the back of a napkin look
that some games use ( mostly Call of Cthulhu), they're not much
more detailed. It's actually a fairly sturdy book - it survived
an attack by 2 hyperactive labrador pups with only minor damage
to the cover and title page.
The layout is very crisp, and generally well done. The only thing
I had trouble with is that the Open Content designation can be a
bit confusing. Why? Well, it's stuff in a box that has a
'parchment backing'. Unfortunately, this is hard to tell in some
cases, most notably the maps. They're have a parchment backing,
or looks like it, though a different sort of parchment backing
used in the example of what is open content. Are they open
content or not? For most people this doesn't matter, but given
that there are seemingly 100s of d20 companies and writers, it
does matter a bit. Atlas's other d20 books have a much clearer
sort of designation - they should stick with that.
It also has quite possibly the worst pun I've ever seen in a
gaming product (Page 107, the name of the familiar). Just a pun
wouldn't be so bad, except it makes a reference to a
historical
figure on Earth. Things like that drive me crazy, because
they completely ruin the suspension of disbelief - on the one
hand, here's this very detailed city, but boom, all of a sudden,
there's an in your face reminder that it's not real. Thankfully,
there's only one, not dozens, like a certain other city book that
will go unnamed (and this author also apparently worked on, now
that I look...hmmm), but it's still annoying. It's also a really
bad pun.
So all in all, worth buying. Not a must buy, but something that
is very handy for anyone running a fantasy campaign. While it is
a d20 product, it's fairly light on stats, and should be usuable
in almost any fantasy game, as long as it's not too weird (no
talking giant ducks or something...).
While I might have dwelled too much on the negative on this book,
it's really hard to write about what makes this book special -
the writeups of the NPCs - their personality, background, etc.
It's kind of like trying to say why Pulp Fiction is such a good
movie. It's not really the plot, or the story, but the characters
and dialogue that makes it a great movie.
A-
