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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010183" data-attributes="member: 18387">By Bruce Boughner, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack and Co-host of Mortality RadioSizing 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 <a href="http://www.d20zines.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=&topic=4" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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