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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2009620" data-attributes="member: 1129">Seven CitiesWritten by Matt ForbeckPublished by Atlas Games 144 b & w pages$21.95Seven Cities is a collection of seven communities for any d20 fantasy campaign.  It starts off by an introduction chapter that GMs should read with a careful eye because it’s a set up chapter.  Here you’ll learn about the differences between a village and a town and a small city and a metropolis.  More important though, it provides some quick rules for generating the number of guards in a city, designing power groups, coming up with ideas on how many temples are in a town, as well as what effect disease and fire can have on a city based campaign.  I enjoyed the breakdown of the different sized towns, thorp, hamlet, village, small town, large town, small city, large city and metropolis as it provides me a benchmark to judge the size of not only my own creations but those of other campaigns and build on elements from there.After the introduction, the book is broken into seven chapters, each one covering a community, going from the smallest, the Thorp, to the Large City.  Unfortunately, there is no metropolis covered here as the author feels such a huge place, a city boosting over 25,000 people, surely deserves its own book.  Each of these towns is connected in minor ways to the other, mostly by the Rock River where the towns are built alongside.  As the communities grow larger, fewer details are provided on the overall city.  For example, in the thorp Lorantan, elvish for “rock ford”, all of the buildings are detailed out so GMs get a very good idea of what’s going on here.  In the large city however, not half as many locations are detailed out.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the locations in the city that are mapped out are huge locations with lots of action and activity going on about them.Each town starts off with a stat block that covers the important information a GM may need to know at a glance.  Who rules the city?  What’s the ready cash amount?  What type of power center does the town boast?  In addition, history, and layout provide the GM ideas on how the place came to be and helps the GM to customize such entries into his own campaign world.    The maps are easy to read and use and labeled so that when you see ST6 on the map, you can easily find the entry for it.  The only fault here is no overland map showing how all of these locations might be linked together on an overhead map.  The descriptions provide the GM enough material to throw the goods into the game with little preparation before hand and provide maps and NPCs.  Bad news is that the maps aren’t scaled and the NPCs don’t come with complete stats.  Sometimes only being a name, alignment, race and level.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either though as the need for stats on commoners isn’t going to hold most GMs back from using the mayor of a small town or the village medic.  With the more adventuresome characters, we do get full stats.  Each section also ends with a several adventure seeds, which can augment the ideas planted in the villages themselves. The book uses the standard two column layout.  Art is good to excellent.  Maps are easily readable and numerous.  Smaller maps of individual locations are lacking any sense of scale though.  Grids!  I demand grids!  White space and text to page ratio are good, better than in many earlier Atlas d20 products.  The OGC material is easy to determine and use.  The Index includes entries for community stats, NPCS stats, magic items, traps and miscellaneous details.Are there any bad or terrible parts to Seven Cities?  Not really bad, some stuff that could be improved like the text to page ratio and the layout.  In contrast to Seven Strongholds, there isn’t as much new d20 stuff.  I still chuckle occasionally when I reread bits of Seven Strongholds.  Some of the feats in that book were great.  This isn’t to say that there is no crunch in this product.  True, you won’t find any feats or PrCs, but there are several new magic items and lots of NPCs that can be taken out of these locations and put into your own campaign.  Are there any parts I really didn’t like?  As I’ve noted in a few other columns, I personally won’t get as much use of this because most of the communities are small, perfect for lower level adventurers to hail from or mid-level ones to stop in and help out.  Me though?  I’m a little leery of these small communities and hunger for a larger book, hoping perhaps that we’ll see a Metropolis detailed by Atlas.  I know I’m looking forward to Splintered Peace to see how that plays out.Right away I know I’ll be using Battle City, a city originally built upon an island on the rock river.  Not only does it have it’s own arcane college, but the whole concept fits easily into the war torn Scarred Lands.  I’ll also be stealing the large city of Solamber because the Scarred Lands authors haven’t gotten around to providing another city where players can be comfortable outside of Mithril yet.  It has several churches, all using ‘generic’ gods (i.e. Sun God, Night God, etc…) that’ll be easy to translate without losing too much sleep.  It also have some ‘bad’ parts of town where the rogues and bards can utilize their skills to gather information and help keep the game moving.  Best of all, the ongoing battle between the Sunlord and the Night Lady makes for good background tidbits I can customize.Heck, if you’re really brave, you may notice that quite a bit of information here isn’t reliant on the d20 system and gasp, may be used with any fantasy system.  I know some of the locations will fit right into Warhammer FRPG without any problem. In closing, Seven Cities does a lot of the work of building a fantasy community for you and makes the GMs job just that much easier.</blockquote>

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