Temple Quarter: A City Quarters Sourcebook

[Crothian]

By JD Wiker (co-author of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game and the d20 Menace Manual) and Christopher West.

Temple Quarter: A City Quarters Sourcebook is the second volume of the award-winning City Quarters series, which began with the highly acclaimed Thieves' Quarter. Thieves' Quarter is the winner of the 2004 Gen Con EN World RPG Awards for Best Setting Supplement (silver) and Best Cartography (gold), and Temple Quarter is being produced by the same people.

Temple Quarter explores the prayer houses, ritual spaces, and religious orders that might appear in any urban fantasy setting, including the secretive, forbidden rites of dark orders. Every aspect of the setting is created with the larger city of Liberty in mind, but designed so that GMs can pick and choose which elements to include in their own campaigns.

Temple Quarter includes:

* sixteen maps by Christopher West, a regular contributor to Dragon and Dungeon magazines
* forty complete NPC stat blocks, from high priests to temple lay clergy
* new rules for rites and ceremonies
* guidelines for religious conversion
* plots, plot hooks, and conspiracies linking it all together

Requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons®, Third Edition Core Books, published by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. This product utilizes updated material from the v.3.5 revision.

 

[Crothian]

Temple Quarter

It was last year when I was reading a book called Thieves Quarter. My thoughts on the book were that it was really well done and I really wanted the rest of the cities districts described in that kind of detail and I wanted them right away. Of course that was not meant to be as books take time to write and produce. But the second book is out now and it covers the Temple district. One of the things I had to do when reading it was to go back and look at the Thieves Quarter book. The Temple Quarter is an outstanding book and while I knew I liked the first one, I could not remember just how good it was. Consistency in books like this the cover different parts of the same city must be hard, doubly so since the writing quality is so high. What amazes me is that Temple Quarter is actually better then Thieves quarter in my opinion. Of course this means I am going to be even more impatient for the rest of the books on this city, but if they are like this one it will well be worth the wait.

Temple Quarter is a new book by Games Mechanic. They have of course published Thieves Quarter as well as Martial Arts Mayhem and Modern Magic. They have only a few books out compared to some of the bigger companies but they have a really high constancy to the quality of them. The PDF is a little under a hundred pages and it is just great looking. The art, cartography, lay out are all very high quality. There is color in the maps and the buildings that are mapped out. The rest of the art is black and white. One great think that they included was maps that are for the players. The maps are color like the others but do not have names of places on them. There is a map of the city as well as a closer map for the whole Temple District

The book is more then just a part of a city. Though the city of Liberty seems really well thought out and cool. I think it ranks up there along Bluffside and Freeport in terms of d20 city settings go. It is hard to tell without the rest of the districts but so far very very good. But I digress, the book describes in good detail churches, their gods, and their rituals. There are lots of great details in the book.

The book starts with a introduction to the publishing company and authors. It then goes into the city. This looks like the same material in Thieves Quarter with the history of Liberty and descriptions of the different districts. It is good to see the material reprinted since not everyone will have all the books. Though a person really should. The map of the city looks really cool. This would be a beautiful city to live in. There are three rivers that come and meet in the harbor that the city surrounds. There are a few waterfalls and a big lighthouse. The city has fields around it but also some wilderness trees in the north. Christopher West does the Cartography and while I am not that familiar with his stuff he has done a fabulous job.

The bulk of the book covers the temples. It isn’t just the temples that they cover though. There are ceremonies and rituals for the different gods presented. There is also info on who worships at the different places. There are notable features of each of the places, NPCs fully described for the different temples, lots of really good information here.

The city as a whole has a good set of laws and weapon and armor restrictions. This might be the most complete set of weapon and armor restrictions that have been in print. There are church and civil laws here as well. Different people have different restrictions. Clergy can carry the favored weapons of the gods, farmers can carry quarterstaffs, no one gets to wear medium or heavy armor except the guards, etc.

The city feels alive especially with the plots sections. This part really shows the movers and shakers of the city and what is going on. There actually might be too much going on in this city by the time it all written and defined. There are plots here of all manner for a variety of different adventures ideas for players. The book also includes some random encounters of people that might be meet at different places.

There is a lot in this book. The gods and their rituals and followers alone makes the book worthwhile but on top of that we get a city section too. Games Mechanics has done a fantastic job on this city and I can only hope that they somehow speed up the releases of the rest of it.

 

[Khayman]

Excellent --- I'm looking forward to getting my copy! I shared a similar concern that somehow, after Thieves' Quarter, this one would leave me feeling like I did after I paid full price for The Phantom Menace.

 

[Jaws]

Christopher West

Christopher West does the Cartography and while I am not that familiar with his stuff he has done a fabulous job.

Haven't you picked up an issue of Dungeon magazine? I know he has since 3.0 came out. He isn't in every issue but should be. He is my favorite cartographer just above Ed Bourelle.


Peace and smiles

j.

 

[Crothian]

Nope, I don't get or use Dungeon magazine.

 

[D20Dazza]

But how portable is it? With all the detail on gods and stuff how much work would someone need to do to drop the city in say Sharn? Would it mean massive rewrites? Does the book offer any suggestions for using it in different settings and changnig the gods??

Cheers

Daz

 

[Psion]

But how portable is it? With all the detail on gods and stuff how much work would someone need to do to drop the city in say Sharn?

I found that, for my purposes, the specificness of the deities was a little problematic. Of course, it's difficult to make such a book flavorful AND keep deities portable, so it's a tough problem to be sure.

I can't comment specifically on Eberron, though, but in any case, the buildings and some encounters and situations should be fairly portable. Perhaps re-imagine it as a sort of lower-class commoner temple district by the docks.

 

[Crothian]

I also don't know Eberron well to say specifically how well it would move over there. But I imagine it would be pretty easy to find gods in whatever setting that are similar to the ones in here and just make the Temples to them. One might have to move some of the rituals around to have them fit the right gods, but for the most part I don't think it will be that big of a problem. It will take some work, but doible

 

[William Ronald]

I was looking at this book the other day at Games Plus, and I am more intrigued. I may want to adapt this to the homebrew I am working on.

I think it would be fairly easy to adapt the temples to different settings, remembering that a deity can have different sects that focus on different parts of a deity's nature. For example, the city may have a particular tradition of worshipping a god that is sllghtly different than other parts of the campaign world. For example, Apollo is a god of the sun, prophecy, archery, and music. So, a local temple might focus on the prophetic aspect -- like Delphi -- while other temples in the setting might focus on Apollo as a sun god or a patron or archers.

Also, a temple can have worship devoted to closely related deities (pantheonic worship). So, a priest of a pantheon may serve the pantheon as a whole. (See Deities and Demigods for examples of how to run a pantheon priest.)

Crothian, how soon will the series be complete?

 

[effrenatus]

Using Temple Quarter Material

In response to the issue of portability, you might want to check out a new free publication from The Game Mechanics and Green Ronin. It's called Freeport's Temple Quarter and there's a link to the PDF in the "Related d20 Fun" section of Green Ronin's web page for Temple Quarter's print edition.
http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1030
Inside, JD Wiker (the author of Temple Quarter) adapts some of the content from his book to Green Ronin's Freeport: The City of Adventure setting. It might give you an idea of how the content can be used for other settings.

If you do adapt Temple Quarter to Eberron or any other popular setting, we'd love to hear about it at The Game Mechanics.

--Marc Schmalz
Web Manager, The Game Mechanics, Inc.