Classic Review by Crothian
Cities are always a good idea for a supplement. With a well designed city I can have dozens or more of adventures that never leave the area. Each shop and non player character can be a neat encounter waiting to happen and the flexibility of just letting the players go where they want is extremely useful. But there is also a very high standard for cities these days. Bluffside, Freeport, and now Liberty are three fabulous cities and rank for me very high as some of the best supplement books I have ever seen. Freedom City, even though it is not a fantasy setting like these others, is another great city that is easy to use and survives being used outside the genre and game it was written for. And of course there is my personal favorite, the city of Sanctuary from the Thieves World novels. This book though is not specifically a city being described. It is actually more like the old City Book series by Flying Buffalo for those of us old enough to remember them. The City Guide though are d20 specific and not purely generic like the Flying Buffalo books were.
City Guide 2 Nautical Necessities is a PDF by Darkquest Games. It is one of four PDFs put out for this city I believe. It is also the first one I have seen although there are four books in the series now. The fifty nine page PDF is black and white with an okay lay out though it does have some white space problems. The art is okay a little grainy and could be better. The book prints out well though the cover can eat some ink as it is color. The cover is in a separate file as a jpeg and the art quality is about the same as inside the book. The book is book marked though with all the NPCs and locations it could have been better book marked. The book marks in the book only include the different places.
There are seven shops and five ships described in this book. Each is very appropriate for a port city and can be easily included in such cities like Freeport, Bluffside, and even Sanctuary. They generalness of the book makes it widely useful though the DM may have to alter some of the details to make the places fit in different cities. Each place is given a full description of the inside and outside. There are no maps or layouts of the places though and that would have been extremely useful as maps are some of the more difficult things for DM’s to produce them. The shops have prices and some inventory lists for what can be bought in them. This is a great touch and very useful for people playing the games. There are quite a bit of NPCs detailed in the book as well. Each has a good stat block in the text as well as descriptions.
The ships described are probably the better part of the book though the buildings are nicely done. The ships are not just big ocean vessels either. One of the ships, the Sudbury, is a tugboat with full crew. They also describe a merchant ship and a Viking longship as well.
The book does have some errors in it. Some are just little things like repeating the page number forty twice and then going to forty two. A more serious mistake is in the Ship called the Antelope. There is no title that says the separates the description from the previous ship. And there is some text overlapping itself and possible missing making it a bit confusing and impossible to follow. Lucky, as a PDF this can easily be fixed and re-released. Hopefully they are able to do that. Ironically the error is also on page forty.
The book has some good locations and ships described. The look of the book is not that great but the writing and descriptions are nicely done. Some maps would have been useful but by no means make it a deal breaker. This is a good generic fantasy set of building s and ships and should prove useful to most campaigns.
