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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haakon" data-source="post: 2011383" data-attributes="member: 6192">This is my first review . . . The Village of Briarton is, to me, surprisingly good.  I'd never heard of Gold Rush Games, and they don't make anything else for D&D.WHAT IS IT?Briarton is a village setting, meant as a base of operations or a hometown for an adventuring party.WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT IT?Tone.  I run a campaign that's heavy on medieval feel.  I'm going for something approaching Tolkien and what I think Gygax's early Greyhawk campaign might have been like, rather than for "flashier" high magic campaignsor "trendier" everybody's got spiked leather armor and piercings campaigns.  I like Harn World and MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing game, out of print and never in D20 rules).  These are worlds where most people are peasants or craftsmen serving the peasants, or soldiers protecting them from the wild orcs and worse things of the borderlands.  Places where you don't have to be an ambidextrous drow vampire to be interesting.Call that what you will -- a "Magical Medieval Society" as Expeditious Retreat calls it, or "Third Edition Feel, First Edition Rules" as Necromancer and Goodman Games are going for.  Briarton has that feel, similar to what you find in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil's village of Hommlett,  the Crucible of Freya, Atlas' Seven Cities, or Harn's Trobridge Inn.But I think Briarton does it better than most.  The setting is generic enough to fit in any "Magical Medieval" campaign -- all you need is a forested hilly frontier region -- and yet thoroughly detailed.  I like knowing the history of the place, and having economics form an integral part of the setting: the tinker comes through to repair tin and copper goods once every six weeks, the glassblower has once acquired fine sand from a nearby stream that had residual magic in it, etc.  I like that the many of the NPC characters follow "DMG suggestions" of using physical characteristics to make them instantly memorable for players -- the carpenter is a mute, for instance.It's also interesting that this is a thoroughly good-aligned village, but it's not without its problems.  For example, some villagers have accepted the half-orc in their midst; others avoid him because of the conflict between their personal hatred of orcs and their alignment-based feelings of shame over prejudice.  And of course, there's a bit of evil cult in the making.WHAT IT'S NOTIt's not an adventure.  There are plenty of adventure hooks, but there's not much to fight here.There's not a lot of "crunchy bits" here, and the new skills present (Fishing and Hunting) don't seem new or necessary to me.  But the hearth and home deity presented fits the feel of the setting just right.Trancejeremy is right that the maps aren't great.He's also right that the NPC retired adventurers are not the most original or flashy.  In the same way that, say, Strider the wandering mysterious ranger or Obi-Wan Kenobi the crazy old Hedgewizard out by Dune Sea are not original . . . personally, I'll go for archetypal characters over half-dragon psionics any day of the week.BOTTOM LINEIt all depends on what you want.  Mainstream D&D seems to have moved on from this sort of product, which is just not sexy enough for the era of "alternative D&D" like Eberron.  But I love it, since it fits exactly with the kind of stories I want to tell.  Old school medieval fantasy "classic rock D&D", with better writing than most, is what you'll find in Briarton.</blockquote>

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