Game: Urban Blight: Foul Locales
Publisher: Mystic Eye Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 20th, July 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 9
Average Score: 4.50
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.
