Messageboard Golem
First Post
A collection of detailed urban locales for your d20 fantasy setting. They are complete locations that include full descriptions and maps. The types of locations will vary widely and will all be coded for ease of use.
Urban Blight
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GameWyrd
Explorer
Urban Blight is the first offering in Mystic Eye Games’s Foul Locations series. Strangely, the first thing I noticed when I flicked open the cover was a credit to SkeletonKey Games; a mention in the cartography section. My initial feeling of "what’s going on?" was quickly set at rest. The maps are simply something else; well worth effort and the credit to the rival (presumably friendly) company. In fact, in this fast paced hobby of ours, Urban Blight was nominated as a candidate in the popular Ennies awards for best cartography only a few days after the book arrived on my desk.
The maps are good. What about the rest of the book?
Urban Blight is a connection of interesting and sometimes rather worrying locations your adventuring group might visit while in a city, or more appropriately, in an urban setting. The book isn’t another collection of inns with flirty barmaids, a thug of a bouncer and wizard lurking in the corner ready to pay the would-be heroes some serious coin to go fetch a magic item he should have been able to get himself. Urban Blight does do an inn or so but your characters are less likely to flirt with the staff than they are to be slyly drugged, dragged off and sold into the slave trade.
The introduction to Urban Blight is important. The authors are up front as to what the book is not and what it does not provide. There’s no complete adventures here, just some protracted encounters. If your cast of characters are sold as slaves then... well, you’ll have to pick up from there because the book doesn’t go there. Many of the encounters are rather tricky and I think no small percentage of characters will end up running a foul and so any GM using Urban Blight should be prepared for that. There’s also a rather terse key code for these foul locations; at a glance a GM is supposed to be able to tell where about in the city the location might be found, who might be interested in it and what exactly it is (whether it’s a shop, a house, a temple, etc). I think this code is a step in the right direction but even though its only a page away from the table of contents I think the chart which maps the key code to the locations would have been greatly enhanced with the addition of page numbers.
Urban Blight is a 128-paged soft back and at $16.95 it’s a fair priced book. It also seems more robust, less rustic, than some of the early Mystic Eye books. The quality of paper is much improved but I don’t think overall spooky feel that Mystic Eye books seem to succeed in producing is adversely affected by this slide up the quality scale.
The artwork helps to build the ambience and put the GM in the right mindset for the style of encounters in the book. The illustrations are often cast in heavy shadow and it is amazing how many of them seem to be drawn almost entirely from carefully grouped vertical lines and this really does build up a rather gothic style to the book’s appearance.
There are 16 main "adventure locations" and then a combination of a well and a bridge for some mini-locations and finally a "special" section for the Travelstead Library which has been presented as a web-enhanced (with colour maps) offering on Mystic Eye website.
There is a fairly wide range of campaigning styles in the book. Some of the locations are best suited for high fantasy and powerful characters; such as the illusion powered but still rather deadly, adventurer training provided by "Traces". Other locations are very much more in the low fantasy theme and suited for a gritty style of play. Below the Slaughter House is an example of such a location, a favourite from the book, where the players are simply caught in the sewers just when the dirty slaughter house overhead opens its sluices and the rain of blood and guts pours into the sewers, whipping the local carrion up into a feeding frenzy. Even though the focus of Below the Slaughter House is this dreadful combination of events there’s no attempt at all to railroad the players into the scene, in fact there’s advice in the encounter as to what the players might do to avoid the icky scene and what might happen as a result. Most of the locations and encounters in the book are more detailed and more complex than the example above but it’s a rare exception which even suggests pushing the players in any direction would be a good thing. This is one of the strengths of the book; the re-usability of the locations, of the foul encounters, is high. If your players don’t bite the bait and move on without noticing that there’s something dodgy going on then you can have the very same encounter in the Bazaar laying in wait for them in the next city they visit in a way that you couldn’t have a mysterious temple repeat in every forest the party of heroes get lost in until they actually pluck up the courage to actually explore the temple. Since Urban Blight is a collection of encounters and locations its means that even if your players never get involved with the events in the bazaar then there’s still seventeen other ways to get your money worth from the book.
I liked the way the locations are presented as somewhere with something interesting happening or with the potential for something interesting to happen in and then concluded with a section of possible hooks to involve your players with and possible twists to the story. Actually, there’s more build up than just a location where something interesting might happen since all the involved NPCs are presented in away which makes it clear how they might react and how other NPCs might react to those reactions the characters provoke from the first NPC they meet. There’s also a list of rumours, some true, some false which the players might pick up about the places and people and these come along with DCs if the characters actually set out to dig up information. I might want to tinker with some of the DC values for these rumours but on the on they seem about right.
There’s some extra stuff in Urban Blight too. There’s a whole prestige class - the Shadow Stalker - that comes with one of the encounters. I’m not a fan of sneaking prestige classes in books like this, I’d rather see them in specialised books such as Librum Equitis (a book by Ambient but which also bares the mark of the Mystic Eye) but I don’t suppose the presence of the class damages Urban Blight in any way what so ever. The Shadow Stalker is given full due treatment too, detailed through 10 levels and so I can’t accuse it of being a token effort either.
I certainly have my favourites in Urban Blights. I much preferred the lower powered and subtler style of encounter in contrast to those places where the characters quickly find themselves in deep trouble, tricky combat and a world of pain. The latter style is rather too prevalent for my tastes but I suspect it appeals to a wider general base of games. At a more detailed level of inspection the range of styles in the encounters, locations and NPCs are extremely varied and this must because a whole coterie of authors, twelve in total, contributed to these 18 or so locations.
My general opinion is not to bother with pre-written adventures. Books like Urban Blight help to add weight to my conviction; if you’re a busy GM who needs to free up some time by making use of an encounter written by someone else then you should go out and buy this book or a similar one.
This GameWyrd review can be read here.
The maps are good. What about the rest of the book?
Urban Blight is a connection of interesting and sometimes rather worrying locations your adventuring group might visit while in a city, or more appropriately, in an urban setting. The book isn’t another collection of inns with flirty barmaids, a thug of a bouncer and wizard lurking in the corner ready to pay the would-be heroes some serious coin to go fetch a magic item he should have been able to get himself. Urban Blight does do an inn or so but your characters are less likely to flirt with the staff than they are to be slyly drugged, dragged off and sold into the slave trade.
The introduction to Urban Blight is important. The authors are up front as to what the book is not and what it does not provide. There’s no complete adventures here, just some protracted encounters. If your cast of characters are sold as slaves then... well, you’ll have to pick up from there because the book doesn’t go there. Many of the encounters are rather tricky and I think no small percentage of characters will end up running a foul and so any GM using Urban Blight should be prepared for that. There’s also a rather terse key code for these foul locations; at a glance a GM is supposed to be able to tell where about in the city the location might be found, who might be interested in it and what exactly it is (whether it’s a shop, a house, a temple, etc). I think this code is a step in the right direction but even though its only a page away from the table of contents I think the chart which maps the key code to the locations would have been greatly enhanced with the addition of page numbers.
Urban Blight is a 128-paged soft back and at $16.95 it’s a fair priced book. It also seems more robust, less rustic, than some of the early Mystic Eye books. The quality of paper is much improved but I don’t think overall spooky feel that Mystic Eye books seem to succeed in producing is adversely affected by this slide up the quality scale.
The artwork helps to build the ambience and put the GM in the right mindset for the style of encounters in the book. The illustrations are often cast in heavy shadow and it is amazing how many of them seem to be drawn almost entirely from carefully grouped vertical lines and this really does build up a rather gothic style to the book’s appearance.
There are 16 main "adventure locations" and then a combination of a well and a bridge for some mini-locations and finally a "special" section for the Travelstead Library which has been presented as a web-enhanced (with colour maps) offering on Mystic Eye website.
There is a fairly wide range of campaigning styles in the book. Some of the locations are best suited for high fantasy and powerful characters; such as the illusion powered but still rather deadly, adventurer training provided by "Traces". Other locations are very much more in the low fantasy theme and suited for a gritty style of play. Below the Slaughter House is an example of such a location, a favourite from the book, where the players are simply caught in the sewers just when the dirty slaughter house overhead opens its sluices and the rain of blood and guts pours into the sewers, whipping the local carrion up into a feeding frenzy. Even though the focus of Below the Slaughter House is this dreadful combination of events there’s no attempt at all to railroad the players into the scene, in fact there’s advice in the encounter as to what the players might do to avoid the icky scene and what might happen as a result. Most of the locations and encounters in the book are more detailed and more complex than the example above but it’s a rare exception which even suggests pushing the players in any direction would be a good thing. This is one of the strengths of the book; the re-usability of the locations, of the foul encounters, is high. If your players don’t bite the bait and move on without noticing that there’s something dodgy going on then you can have the very same encounter in the Bazaar laying in wait for them in the next city they visit in a way that you couldn’t have a mysterious temple repeat in every forest the party of heroes get lost in until they actually pluck up the courage to actually explore the temple. Since Urban Blight is a collection of encounters and locations its means that even if your players never get involved with the events in the bazaar then there’s still seventeen other ways to get your money worth from the book.
I liked the way the locations are presented as somewhere with something interesting happening or with the potential for something interesting to happen in and then concluded with a section of possible hooks to involve your players with and possible twists to the story. Actually, there’s more build up than just a location where something interesting might happen since all the involved NPCs are presented in away which makes it clear how they might react and how other NPCs might react to those reactions the characters provoke from the first NPC they meet. There’s also a list of rumours, some true, some false which the players might pick up about the places and people and these come along with DCs if the characters actually set out to dig up information. I might want to tinker with some of the DC values for these rumours but on the on they seem about right.
There’s some extra stuff in Urban Blight too. There’s a whole prestige class - the Shadow Stalker - that comes with one of the encounters. I’m not a fan of sneaking prestige classes in books like this, I’d rather see them in specialised books such as Librum Equitis (a book by Ambient but which also bares the mark of the Mystic Eye) but I don’t suppose the presence of the class damages Urban Blight in any way what so ever. The Shadow Stalker is given full due treatment too, detailed through 10 levels and so I can’t accuse it of being a token effort either.
I certainly have my favourites in Urban Blights. I much preferred the lower powered and subtler style of encounter in contrast to those places where the characters quickly find themselves in deep trouble, tricky combat and a world of pain. The latter style is rather too prevalent for my tastes but I suspect it appeals to a wider general base of games. At a more detailed level of inspection the range of styles in the encounters, locations and NPCs are extremely varied and this must because a whole coterie of authors, twelve in total, contributed to these 18 or so locations.
My general opinion is not to bother with pre-written adventures. Books like Urban Blight help to add weight to my conviction; if you’re a busy GM who needs to free up some time by making use of an encounter written by someone else then you should go out and buy this book or a similar one.
This GameWyrd review can be read here.
Simon Collins
Explorer
Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.
Urban Blight is the first in Mystic Eye Games' Foul Locales series containing plug-in locations. This one details 19 urban locations.
Urban Blight is a 128-page softcover book, coming in at $16.95, comparatively good value for content volume. This assessment is enhanced by the good use of font size, small margins and lack of white space (in fact, sometimes the lack of white space, particularly around sidebars, makes it look a little cluttered). The mono art is mostly well done, particularly that by Eric Lofgren, and the cover art makes good use of light and atmosphere. Maps are nicely presented, mainly 1 square to 5 feet, though lacking compass direction and sometimes seeming a little spartan. Writing quality is average and editing fairly poor, and errors are fundamental (such as the title spelling of 'Cemetary' on one of the maps).
The introduction at the beginning of the book gives a good overview of how to use the book. It is a series of locales with NPCs and adventure hooks, not a book of complete adventures, nor are all (or any) of the locations all to be used in the same city. Each locale has the following information: brief description, keyed location description with accompanying maps, NPCs and creatures, varying special items, feats, spells or prestige classes linked to the location, adventure hooks, advice on integration, and sidebars covering miscellaneous information. Each locale is coded as to its use - e.g. shop, residence, etc, and its appropriate city location - from impoverished through to wealthy sectors. The ELs of the nineteen locations run from 3 to 17 with eleven in the 6 to 12 range.
The locales are:
* Below The Slaughterhouse - sewers beneath a slaughterhouse with dire rats, ghouls and diseases.
* Caught In Time - shop selling timepieces, run by a gnome, with various magical clocks and traps.
* The Dancing Bull - dockside tavern that acts as a front for a slaving operation.
* Doctor Modar - backstreet vampire quack's surgery, specialising in magical face and skin grafts.
* Flavour Country - sweet shop specialising in hiding magical items in confectionery.
* Forgotten Pains - torture for cash shop, run by a half-dragon expert at extracting information.
* High Marsh Cemetery - cemetery and mausoleum haunted by a ghost and a vampire.
* Icons By Demand - shop fronting a thieves guild contact, specialising in breaking into noble houses.
* Rahit's Furniture Bazaar - safe house for assassin cabal including shadow stalker prestige class
* Sar-Ra-Tu's Gaming House - gambling, drinking, gladiators, dogfighting, cockfighting, a lottery and massage parlour
* The Shard - library run by a vampire and staffed by lesser undead, with secret evil laboratory
* Tannen's - occult and arcane shop with a powerful antimagic shield
* Traces - 'virtual reality' battles with illusionary monsters at a price
* The Traps Of Fengarus Clelt - wizards manor, home of vengeful mage who sends deadly gifts to those he hates.
* Tomb Of Amir Hamma - arabian-style tomb 'haunted' by two villainous half-brothers.
* Volio's Leather Goods - leather shop dealing in all types of skins, aided by local necromancer and ghouls.
* The Bridge - mini locale involving a disguised bridge.
* The Well - a mini locale involving the well of the title, disease and an ooze.
* The Travelstead Library - books with hooks.
Conclusion:
A useful book if you need a location or three in a hurry for a city-based adventure. Richly detailed NPCs, a wealth of hooks, and a range of city settings and encounter levels are the best features of this book. The adventure locales themselves are interesting (and sometimes unusual). All the creatures used in the locations are from Core Rulebook III but sidebars do introduce a few new items, feats, spells, etc., and a prestige class.
Overall, a book of interesting locations with a good level of detail, easy to drop into most city adventures. My only disappointment was the quality of the writing and editing which, while not poor, never rose much above average. This meant the setting descriptions lacked some flavour and atmosphere.
This is not a playtest review.
Urban Blight is the first in Mystic Eye Games' Foul Locales series containing plug-in locations. This one details 19 urban locations.
Urban Blight is a 128-page softcover book, coming in at $16.95, comparatively good value for content volume. This assessment is enhanced by the good use of font size, small margins and lack of white space (in fact, sometimes the lack of white space, particularly around sidebars, makes it look a little cluttered). The mono art is mostly well done, particularly that by Eric Lofgren, and the cover art makes good use of light and atmosphere. Maps are nicely presented, mainly 1 square to 5 feet, though lacking compass direction and sometimes seeming a little spartan. Writing quality is average and editing fairly poor, and errors are fundamental (such as the title spelling of 'Cemetary' on one of the maps).
The introduction at the beginning of the book gives a good overview of how to use the book. It is a series of locales with NPCs and adventure hooks, not a book of complete adventures, nor are all (or any) of the locations all to be used in the same city. Each locale has the following information: brief description, keyed location description with accompanying maps, NPCs and creatures, varying special items, feats, spells or prestige classes linked to the location, adventure hooks, advice on integration, and sidebars covering miscellaneous information. Each locale is coded as to its use - e.g. shop, residence, etc, and its appropriate city location - from impoverished through to wealthy sectors. The ELs of the nineteen locations run from 3 to 17 with eleven in the 6 to 12 range.
The locales are:
* Below The Slaughterhouse - sewers beneath a slaughterhouse with dire rats, ghouls and diseases.
* Caught In Time - shop selling timepieces, run by a gnome, with various magical clocks and traps.
* The Dancing Bull - dockside tavern that acts as a front for a slaving operation.
* Doctor Modar - backstreet vampire quack's surgery, specialising in magical face and skin grafts.
* Flavour Country - sweet shop specialising in hiding magical items in confectionery.
* Forgotten Pains - torture for cash shop, run by a half-dragon expert at extracting information.
* High Marsh Cemetery - cemetery and mausoleum haunted by a ghost and a vampire.
* Icons By Demand - shop fronting a thieves guild contact, specialising in breaking into noble houses.
* Rahit's Furniture Bazaar - safe house for assassin cabal including shadow stalker prestige class
* Sar-Ra-Tu's Gaming House - gambling, drinking, gladiators, dogfighting, cockfighting, a lottery and massage parlour
* The Shard - library run by a vampire and staffed by lesser undead, with secret evil laboratory
* Tannen's - occult and arcane shop with a powerful antimagic shield
* Traces - 'virtual reality' battles with illusionary monsters at a price
* The Traps Of Fengarus Clelt - wizards manor, home of vengeful mage who sends deadly gifts to those he hates.
* Tomb Of Amir Hamma - arabian-style tomb 'haunted' by two villainous half-brothers.
* Volio's Leather Goods - leather shop dealing in all types of skins, aided by local necromancer and ghouls.
* The Bridge - mini locale involving a disguised bridge.
* The Well - a mini locale involving the well of the title, disease and an ooze.
* The Travelstead Library - books with hooks.
Conclusion:
A useful book if you need a location or three in a hurry for a city-based adventure. Richly detailed NPCs, a wealth of hooks, and a range of city settings and encounter levels are the best features of this book. The adventure locales themselves are interesting (and sometimes unusual). All the creatures used in the locations are from Core Rulebook III but sidebars do introduce a few new items, feats, spells, etc., and a prestige class.
Overall, a book of interesting locations with a good level of detail, easy to drop into most city adventures. My only disappointment was the quality of the writing and editing which, while not poor, never rose much above average. This meant the setting descriptions lacked some flavour and atmosphere.
Messageboard Golem
First Post
By Bruce Boughner, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack and Co-host of Mortality Radio
Sizing Up the Target
Foul Locales: Urban Blight is a 127-page soft cover accessory published by Mystic Eye Games. Edited by Charles Plemons III and written by a host of contributors, the cover is by Jhoneil Centeno and depicts a couple of adventurers moving into a blighted urban area, and interior art is by a handful of artists. Urban Blight retails for $16.95.
First Blood
Urban Blight is a collection of lairs/locations/encounters for city areas. The authors begin with an introduction page stating what the book is: highly detailed locations that can fit into any city setting, a bit on the dark side and definitely for the mature player, that includes maps, items, characters and their unique qualities and definitely several vampires. They also state what the book is not: a book of complete adventures.
Each locale is presented with a brief description, locale details, NPCs and creatures, Specialties, Adventure seeds and hooks and where it fits in a standard fantasy city of large town.
The adventures listed are very good; there is enough information on each encounter to give a DM a good sense of location and the NPC’s character and demeanor. And yet each one is generic enough that you could add or adapt to fit any city you currently are using. Of course these were meant to fit in Mystic Eye’s Hunt, Rise of Evil campaign setting and are by most standards a darker, almost Ravenloft-like encounters.
The adventures run the gamut from a haunted library to the abattoir under a slaughterhouse. A curio shop with an eccentric owner designed to be a source of information to a leather good store, whose owner specializes in demi-human leather.
Shorter little adventures are included, like a well that has become a lair, chasing away the local residents. There is also a bridge that is not what it seems, a dockside tavern that smuggles live cargo and a doctor performing hideous experiments.
As the author states, these are not full-fledged adventures, they are random encounters, fillers for between adventures or the set-up for a new one. These can become regular stops between dungeon crawls, places to sell odious magic items your players recovered or to gain information before solving a devilish mystery.
There are a couple of new spells, feats and magic in this book, but it isn’t bogged down with it. Urban Blight also uses the half-troll template developed by Bastion Press, using the advantages of the Open Gaming Content. It is as advertised, an encounter book of urban blighted areas, with an emphasis on adding to your existing campaign setting, not replacing it. And encounters, NOT adventures, some of these places are designed to be used again and again, although some of the characters in the book have the making of a good recurring villain.
Critical Hits
The book is a gem, I was instantly taken with some of the encounters listed here. Adapted with other works and some other creatures that can switch out can make these encounters stronger or weaker as the situation demands. Many of these blighted areas are definitely going to be used in my campaign, as they are too good to pass up.
Critical Misses
As a first effort this book excels at what it was designed to do, provide reusable encounter areas to assist the DM. As with many first attempts, it needs minor improvements, some of the interior art can be improved upon and the layouts could use tweaking but the technical aspects are minor details by comparison to the more important details like the content.
Coup de Grace
Mystic Eye has always impressed me with their willingness to create accessories that can adapt well with any other company’s products. Urban Blight does that right out of the gate, adding juicy little tidbits that can whet a group’s appetite or provide interesting information to make that first step out the door towards your own deviously designed crawls. This being the first of a series, others are announced at the back of the book, if the others measure up to this standard or better, they have my buck.
To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.
Sizing Up the Target
Foul Locales: Urban Blight is a 127-page soft cover accessory published by Mystic Eye Games. Edited by Charles Plemons III and written by a host of contributors, the cover is by Jhoneil Centeno and depicts a couple of adventurers moving into a blighted urban area, and interior art is by a handful of artists. Urban Blight retails for $16.95.
First Blood
Urban Blight is a collection of lairs/locations/encounters for city areas. The authors begin with an introduction page stating what the book is: highly detailed locations that can fit into any city setting, a bit on the dark side and definitely for the mature player, that includes maps, items, characters and their unique qualities and definitely several vampires. They also state what the book is not: a book of complete adventures.
Each locale is presented with a brief description, locale details, NPCs and creatures, Specialties, Adventure seeds and hooks and where it fits in a standard fantasy city of large town.
The adventures listed are very good; there is enough information on each encounter to give a DM a good sense of location and the NPC’s character and demeanor. And yet each one is generic enough that you could add or adapt to fit any city you currently are using. Of course these were meant to fit in Mystic Eye’s Hunt, Rise of Evil campaign setting and are by most standards a darker, almost Ravenloft-like encounters.
The adventures run the gamut from a haunted library to the abattoir under a slaughterhouse. A curio shop with an eccentric owner designed to be a source of information to a leather good store, whose owner specializes in demi-human leather.
Shorter little adventures are included, like a well that has become a lair, chasing away the local residents. There is also a bridge that is not what it seems, a dockside tavern that smuggles live cargo and a doctor performing hideous experiments.
As the author states, these are not full-fledged adventures, they are random encounters, fillers for between adventures or the set-up for a new one. These can become regular stops between dungeon crawls, places to sell odious magic items your players recovered or to gain information before solving a devilish mystery.
There are a couple of new spells, feats and magic in this book, but it isn’t bogged down with it. Urban Blight also uses the half-troll template developed by Bastion Press, using the advantages of the Open Gaming Content. It is as advertised, an encounter book of urban blighted areas, with an emphasis on adding to your existing campaign setting, not replacing it. And encounters, NOT adventures, some of these places are designed to be used again and again, although some of the characters in the book have the making of a good recurring villain.
Critical Hits
The book is a gem, I was instantly taken with some of the encounters listed here. Adapted with other works and some other creatures that can switch out can make these encounters stronger or weaker as the situation demands. Many of these blighted areas are definitely going to be used in my campaign, as they are too good to pass up.
Critical Misses
As a first effort this book excels at what it was designed to do, provide reusable encounter areas to assist the DM. As with many first attempts, it needs minor improvements, some of the interior art can be improved upon and the layouts could use tweaking but the technical aspects are minor details by comparison to the more important details like the content.
Coup de Grace
Mystic Eye has always impressed me with their willingness to create accessories that can adapt well with any other company’s products. Urban Blight does that right out of the gate, adding juicy little tidbits that can whet a group’s appetite or provide interesting information to make that first step out the door towards your own deviously designed crawls. This being the first of a series, others are announced at the back of the book, if the others measure up to this standard or better, they have my buck.
To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.
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