Stonebridge: City of Illusion

[Messageboard Golem]

Written by Patrick Younts (Quintessential Monk), Stonebridge - City of Illusion, is the 4th book in the Cities of Fantasy series, all designed to provide a complete urban environment to drop almost anywhere in an existing campaign world.

Stonebridge is a place where the written word is considered priceless, where paintings and sculptures can be worth more than diamonds and where a song can inspire love that lasts for centuries. Genius and beauty are one and the same here, and invention and ambition are prized higher than martial skills. Dragons and mortals exist together in eternal harmony.

Stonebridge is a city like no other, an oasis of renaissance culture, a home to art-obsessed copper dragons and an impassioned race of gnomes whose blood sings with the twin fires of magic and draconic spirit. Here live the greatest geniuses of the age, men and women who have embraced innovation and bypassed the boundaries of conventional thought for the endless vistas of imagination.

A full map of the city, straddling a huge chasm and connected by a solid bridge that grants its name, is presented on the front inside cover, complete with a detailed key showing the most important locations players are likely to visit. The first chapter gives a complete history of the city, tracking the rise of innovation and invention, as well as casting a detailed look on the inhabitants of Stonebridge. The gnomes here are a little different from their cousins of the outside world, and the Dragon-Touched template will allow the GM to portray some truly unique citizens. Regular festivals, laws and the buildings of the city are also covered, giving the entire location its own feel that will strike the
players as soon as they enter.

The next two chapters detail specific locations of Stonebridge, as well as some of the most important personalities the players will run into - including the copper dragons who have made their own home among the gnomes. These chapters are brimming over with scenario ideas for the Games Master who wishes to insert Stonebridge into his own campaign world, and these are tied together in the next chapter. This focuses on bringing the city into an existing setting, complete with a series of jump off points that will get your players travelling to Stonebridge and begin exploring its majestic secrets.

Stonebridge winds up with Beasts, Magic and Wondrous Machines, a chapter that includes all the new rules necessary to portray the wonders of the city. From the Fey Drake to the Dream Engineer prestige class, from feats such as Dragon Song and Wolf Among Sheep to unique spells such as Anchor Spell, Forked Tongue and Seedling Wyrm, there are reasons enough here for players to want to travel to Stonebridge after they hear of a place filled with unrestricted study and knowledge. Loki, my new Gnome Wizard, wants to go there! New equipment and magic items that may only be found in Stonebridge are also presented, with devices such as the Air Screw, Organ Cannon (oh, yes!) and the Reality Weaver (a device that grounds illusions in reality) being useful as plot elements or causing the players a lot of grief when in the hands of their enemies. . .

 

[John Cooper]

Stonebridge: City of Illusion
By Patrick Younts
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 5004
64 pages, $14.95

Stonebridge: City of Illusion is the fourth book in the "Cities of Fantasy" series. This time around, author Patrick Younts details a Renaissance-level city inhabited mostly by gnomes and ruled by copper dragons - definitely not your standard fantasy city! While Patrick does a fairly good job in detailing the city of Stonebridge, I wasn't as impressed with this book as I was with his previous entry in the "Cities of Fantasy" line, Stormhaven, for a variety of reasons.

The book is broken up into the following chapters:

• Introduction: explaining the "Cities of Fantasy" line
• History and the Present Day: the history of the city of Stonebridge, including a historical timeline to the present day, a look at the citizens (including racial stats for the gnomish subrace and the "Dragon-Touched" template for those with dragon blood in their lineage but who are not half-dragons), and a look at science, religion, government, and the law
• Palazzo, Piazzo and Sandstone Streets: landmark locations in Stonebridge
• Vineyard, Farm and Villa: the area surrounding the city of Stonebridge
• Dragons, Dreamers and Builders: Stats for the major NPCs in Stonebridge
• Stonebridge Adventures: 6 adventures seeds
• Beasts, Magic and Wondrous Machines: the fey drake, the "Dream Engineer" prestige class, 6 new feats, 7 new spells, 2 new clerical domains, and 8 new magic items and (nonmagical) fantastic devices (two of which are artifacts)

The cover art is credited to both Anne Stokes and Ralph Horsley, both of whom have done work for Mongoose before. The cover depicts a copper dragon flying in the chasm that separates the two halves of Stonebridge with the bridge and numerous building in the background. Detail is pretty good (if you look closely you can see an air screw - a primitive two-person helicopter - in the background of the sky just under the bridge), although the copper dragon only bears a superficial resemblance to the one depicted in the Monster Manual. (While this may be due to legal reasons, the illustrations of copper dragons inside the book look much more like MM copper dragons, although they still have what I consider to be "normal" dragon wings instead of those oddball "butterfly/manta ray" dragon wings several of the metallic dragons are sporting in 3E.) The cover picture is done at a slight angle, helping to maintain an illusion of movement, although due to a narrow color palette the copper dragon tends to blend in with the cliff side and the "RIDGE" of "STONEBRIDGE" in the title tends to blend in with the buildings. (Yellow was not a good color choice for the book's title.)

Andrew Dobell is responsible for the entirety of the interior illustrations (21 pictures in all, each black-and-white) and the map of the city on the inside front cover. I usually like this approach (provided the artist is good), as it gives a "unified vision" to the book. Andrew does a pretty good job here, although some of his body proportions seem "off" (the female dragon-touched on page 10 has an awfully big head for her body, for instance), and the shading he attempted in a woman's cleavage on page 42 comes off looking uncomfortably like fur! (Which reminds me - there's no nudity in this book, a refreshing change.) Still and all, like I mentioned earlier, I really like his copper dragons.

As for the city itself, Patrick has done a good job on the foundation and the concept but (in my opinion, and quite possibly many will disagree with me here) rather fumbled some of the details. I really like how Stonebridge is laid out - a walled city on both sides of a wide ravine with a stone bridge connecting the two "halves" - and Patrick did a great job on the city's history, covering a span of 1635 years in only four and a half pages, yet still giving plenty of details on the "whys and hows" of Stonebridge's past. He comes up with plenty of unique details ensuring that Stonebridge is a city unlike any other. However, it is the choice of some of those details that threw me off.

First of all, there's the fact that the population of Stonebridge is 95% gnomes. Now, in creating a fantasy gnome city, Patrick has done two things: he's pretty much "cornered the market" on fantasy gnome cities (I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy gnome city before Stonebridge), and he's also potentially severely limited the marketability of his gaming product. Maybe it's just me, but of all the gamers I've dealt ever with, gnomes are the single-most underused PC race ever. There's a reason for this: many people don't like gnomes, often to the point that gnomes don't even exist in many campaigns. Perhaps Patrick was hoping to give the gnomes a boost; I don't know. In any case, it seemed like an odd choice. (Personally, I'm not a gnome-hater - I use them occasionally for NPCs - but even in my own games I can't recall ever having anyone run a gnome PC.)

Next up, in attempting to give Stonebridge a real "Renaissance feel," Patrick's used Italian to name just about everything in the city. (At least, it looks like Italian to me, although I admit to not speaking Italian - and therein lies one of my problems.) The map's utility - and it's a nice map, no doubt about it, being an actual drawing of the city as seen from above and to the side rather than a top-down map - is severely lessened for me because phrases like "Bronzo Serraglio," "Plazza Botteghe," "Ponte Sofferenza," and "Giardino Sognotore" mean absolutely nothing to me. I have to go read the entry in the book to figure out which buildings are which. (Granted, some of them, like "Teatro di Illusione," are pretty easy to figure out - "Theater of Illusion.") This isn't limited to buildings, either: the rulers are the "Sangue di Drago" and "Sognotore de la Sangue di Drago" ("Dragon's Blood" and "Dreamers of the Dragon's Blood," or "those with draconic lineages" and "sorcerers," respectively.) Many festivals are detailed: all with Italian names. Many landmarks are given: all with Italian names. Many NPCs are given: all with Italian names. I understand why Patrick chose this tactic, but to me at least it acts predominantly as an irritation than as Renaissance flavor. I tend to view the use of real-life languages as taking away from the fantasy feel, anyway.

The whole "Renaissance city" idea is also one of questionable utility to me. Stonebridge is a city where artwork is more important than money, where inventions and science are deemed more important than warfare. Again, this makes for a distinctive city, but is it a useful one? Granted, Stonebridge makes for a unique place to do some heavy roleplaying, but don't expect a whole lot of traditional "adventuring" there. Even the adventure seeds provided in the book are along the lines of telling the gnomish equivalent of Leonardo daVinci that his dad's really a copper dragon, while avoiding the dragon's half-dragon gnome son's machinations to prevent such an occurrence. (The adventure seed even specifies that the half-dragon won't try to kill the PCs, though. Sounds really dangerous, huh?) Other adventure seeds include capturing illusion-warping butterflies (no, I'm not kidding) and test-flying a nonmagical aircraft constructed by the aforementioned Leonardo daVinci. This is a real shame, because Stonebridge's history involves such things as a black dragon enslaving entire villages, gnoll slavers, and a dwarven mine. No plot hooks there, though: the black dragon was slain by the city's founder, the gnolls are no more, and the mine was long ago mined out. You don't really have much to fear in the way of an invasion on the city, either, since there are literally entire families of copper dragons living in the city, and half of the residents are either half-dragons or dragon-touched. All in all, it's as if the city has been deliberately excised of any traditional traits that might make it appealing to adventurers.

Finally, many of the details, while admittedly flavorful, just don't work for me. One of the festivals involves a game of trying to roll a giant copper ball (made of shed dragon scales) to one side of the bridge. It's a bit like soccer, really - except that the ball is as big as a house and weighs several tons. Personally, if I lived in a city that only had one bridge connecting the two halves, the last thing I'd ever do is try rolling a several-ton copper ball around on it. What's to stop it from smashing the side - or all - of the bridge? What's to stop it from rolling over the citizens involved in this crazy sport? (Remember, there are two teams each trying to push it in the opposite direction.) Another festival involves a sort of hide-and-seek game for children under 12, and the last one "found" wins the prize of living for a year with the copper dragons, learning valuable skills. Of course, there's no age cap on this game: as written, a 3-year-old could be selected as a contestant. What 3-year-old wants to be separated from his or her parents at that age, and what valuable skills can even a wise old copper dragon teach a child of that age?

The last chapter is a pretty good one, though: the fey drake is a sort of thinly-disguised faerie dragon, but it's different enough to make a welcome addition to the dragon family. The dream engineer is so-so, although Patrick succumbs to a bit of hyperbole when he states that their illusions can even "fool the gods themselves." I sure hope not - that seems a little too powerful for a mere 5-level illusionist prestige class! The new feats and spells fit in nicely with the setting (many of them being dragon-related), and I absolutely love the seedling wyrm spell! Seedling wyrm is a way for a dragon to create half-dragon offspring without actually having to mate with the other creature. At last, a plausible explanation for some of those weird half-dragon combinations, like half-dragon trolls or otyughs! Some of the magic items are kind of odd (who would pay 500 gp for a one-use doll that dances for 10 minutes before dissipating in a puff of smoke?), but again, they fit the flavor of the city.

Editing isn't too bad this time around: several mistakes, but nothing too bad (mostly incorrect apostrophe usage).

All in all, Stonebridge is both a success and a bit of a failure - it succeeds at its goals but its goals are kind of questionable. It's a well-detailed Renaissance city of dragon-blooded gnomes with an interesting history and plenty of internal consistency. On the other hand, it's a gnomish city with very little utility for a band of adventurers unless they just want to look at artwork or hobnob with artists and inventors. In my mind, that puts it at about average, and thus rates a "3" from me.

 

[Arnwyn]

All Italian names? Wow... how about *trying* to decrease the utility of a product...