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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crothian" data-source="post: 2545105" data-attributes="member: 232">Thieves World Players Manual[imager]http://www.greenronin.com/images/product/grr1801_200.jpg[/imager]    This has been a long time coming for me.  If you want to get to the review and not hear about my life long appreciation of Thieves World, just skip this opening paragraph.  It started for me in the mid eighties when I borrowed the first book of short stories from a friend.  I was too young to read the novels.  Not because they were complex or the vocabulary was too much; it was the issues.  Thieves World deals with a lot of dark and dangerous things like rape, drug abuse, murder, and a countless other evils.  But that did not stop me from reading the twelve volumes of short stories and then trying to find the full length novels some of the authors choose to do.  I was hooked.  And then I saw in the back of this gaming store under a stack of magazines a Thieves World box set.  I had no idea it was converted to a role playing game and so I got it and played it.  I ran Thieves World games for all three editions of D&D, I used Palladium Fantasy, and even a made up system.  But the rules were never as important as the city of Sanctuary.  Since then my enjoyment of the setting has never ceased.  Once I hit college and was able to use the mighty internet I found a board game, modules, and a couple extra copies of the box set.  I got the big map and the smaller ones laminated to use at the gaming table.  I bought graphic novels of the books to have some great pictures to show players a better idea of what Sanctuary was.  But it was d20 that got me vocal about Thieves World once again.  With the message boards and the ability for publishers to use the rules for all sort of things the question of “what setting would you like most to see as a d20 setting?” came up.  And I started in saying Thieves World and few old timers remembered the old box sets that were twenty years old by then.  And for a few years I feared it would never come to be.  But then during the magical moment of Gen Con 2004 when Robert Schwalb at the Green Ronin booth personally told me it was coming.  I was flabbergasted to say the least.  It has been a fun year waiting for the book to come out and now it is out.  Green Ronin does a lot of good things with RPGs, but I must admit I have been curious if it will live up to my inflated standards.  Thieves World for me is the holy grail of gaming.  Now, let us get to the book.    Thieves World Players Manual is a new hardbound book by Green Ronin.  The first thing that struck me as I saw the book was the stunning cover art by James Ryman.  The picture captures Thieves World very well with things going on in the foreground and background. It is a cover in the tradition of the book covers and is very fitting.  The book is written by Lynn Abbey, Gary Astleford, Patrick O’Duffy, and Robert Schwalb.  Lynn Abbey is basically the inventor of the Thieves World setting and it really is impressive to see hewr name on a gaming book about Thieves World.  It is rare for authors to also be credited with the RPG of their works like this.  I interior art is very much like the high quality art Green Ronin uses in their books.  It is in black and white with a good lay out.  The book is only one hundred and ninety pages and I think it could have been longer.  But there are more books for the setting come out so I am hoping they will include a lot more information that I really want.      Now, a fair warning to those people new to the Thieves World setting the city of Sanctuary: it can be dark.  There are prostitutes, drugs, slavery, black magic, curses, rape, and other horrors in the books.  The RPG acknowledges they are there and has a good small section on it and about making sure the players are comfortable with what you as DM are going to put in the game.  It is always good to set some boundaries if that is what people want before going in.  It is also possible to have these things in the game without over doing it.  As always, know the players and what they like and expect.  There is a lot of fun to be had in this setting but the possibilities of offending or disgusting the players and going to far exists.      The book starts with a nice short story from Lynn Abbey and the first chapter is a good over view of everything.  It set s the tone for the book and goes into some great information about the government, laws, taxes, economy, money, coins, languages and writing, time climate, and then a good over view of the city.  This is all great information but it brings my first complaint.  The information is set in the new Sanctuary of the new books and not in the older city I grew up with.  But a great job is done and they really have a lot of adventure ideas hidden in the city.  There are talks of where the hillers set ambushes, what might be haunting the place Enas Yorl used to call home, Swift Smithy is a good person to talk to about rumors from the palace, and so much more.  The climate is covered and each section of the city is described.  Each section is almost a miniature city in and of themselves.  The processional is very different from the Wharves which are very different from the Tween.  And then there is the Maze, possible the most famous of all areas.  The Maze has special rules for getting lost as it is so difficult to manage and it changes as the people build and take down buildings.  Going into the maze and getting back out is an adventure in itself.  It is the most dangerous part of the city and muggings or worse are not uncommon in its narrow alleys and blind corners.  The chapter is a good overview and I hope we get a book that really covers the city in full detail of both the time of the modern books and the old books.  One great thing the old box set did was have random tables for each distract so a DM could populate the city as they saw fit or just at random.      The second chapter gets more into the mechanics and more into the world of Thieves World.  It covers cultures and backgrounds for characters to gave and many of them detail peoples from places far away.  Sanctuary is a place that people from all over find themselves in and many cultures mix in the and around the city.  It is also important to note here that everyone is human.  There are no demi human options in this setting.  So the backgrounds serve to really show the many different types of humans.  Each culture is given a description, a physical description of the people, the ethnic traits of them, the languages they mostly speak, the classes most common for them, a list of culture feats that the player gets to pick one, a small mechanical bonus that helps set the culture apart from others, and the languages they can start with.  There is a quick reference table with most of the mechanical information on it as well as table for heights and weights of people from the many places.  Then each character also picks a background.  These are like beggar, adventurer, herder, etc.  Each has an age modifier (age of character is based on class), each gets a set of skills that are always class skills, and a small trait that is another mechanical and descriptive benefit.      The book does offer new base classes.  While a few of the regular base classes can be used, the changes to the rules really get rid of most of them.  The Thieves World setting does not use alignments; redoes the magic system, introduces a reputation system, and has a few other small changes.  A very nice thing is the book also lists what other classes from Green Ronin class books would be appropriate for the setting.  I really like this cross support for their other books.  Prestige classes are where things really get cool for fans of the books.  There are a lot of classes in there that from the books I had hoped to see as prestige classes.  It is an impressive list of them including Hell Hounds, Blue Star Adept, Crime Lord, Gladiator, Hazard Mage, Irrune Raider, Nisibisi War Witch, S’Danzo Fortune Teller, and many many others.  .  And like with the base classes, there is a great section for adapting prestige classes to Thieves World.  This is something that needs to be addressed for ever d20 setting and I am very pleased to see it for Thieves World.  There are lots of classes in other books that would really fit into Thieves World.  Some will fit as is, and some of them will really need to be altered.  The general guidelines in here should aid in that.  As I have mentioned there are some rule changes.  The biggest is the lack of true healing.  The game uses hit points but healing spells change lethal damage to non lethal damage.  Characters still need to rest to heal that.  Also, massive damage is equal to ones constitution score and can be modified by ones armor and feats.  In addition to worrying about massive damage, characters can get disfigured, and get infections from wounds.  There are great and simple rules for both of these in here.  There are the reputation rules that very well done and rules for contacts.  Sanctuary is a city wear knowing the right person can easily save your life.  The biggest change though is the magic.  Magic using characters cast spells differently then in other games.  There is no spell preparation.  Characters draw in mana from the surrounding area to cast spells.  The higher level of the spell the more mana they have to draw in.  This can take many, many rounds.  So casters have to be careful as that fireball may be coming, but three rounds after they start casting the spell. Also, there are penalties to casting spells and dangers.  It is a very cool and involved system.  There is a lot of risk for the powerful spells but quite a bit of reward can be generated as well.  I have a lot of good things to say about the book but it is not perfect as no book ever is.  The biggest thing missing is a really good map.  There is a map of the continent and a map of the city, but neither are full pages and perhaps I am a little spoiled from my big sanctuary map from the old box set, but I want a big map like from the old box set.  I also would have liked a section about adventures.  It would not need to be a fully fleshed out adventure as that is coming in the soon to be released Murder at the Vulger Unicorn.  I would have liked a list or a section of little adventure ideas.  There are bits and things in the book, but as always I want more.  I also would have liked to see characters from the novels described.  They would not have to be fully stated out though that is nice.  But a good who’s who of the city would really be useful.    Those and the lack of coverage from the old city of Sanctuary are my three biggest complaints about the book.  That is Thieves World in a nutshell.  It brings forth the feel of the novels and allows people to form their own story.  The most important character in my opinion was always the city.  This covers the city and so much more.  I have been waiting many years for someone to do a Thieves World RPG again and I am very pleased to not be disappointed.</blockquote>

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