You Are Here is one of those rare game supplements that not only perfectly matches the game for which it was written, but also functions well in much the same way for completely different game systems. The reliance on concepts--specifically, places, people, and plots--rather than crunchy numbers means that any GM can easily pull the majority of the book's contents and, with a little tweaking for setting, use it for almost any campaign. While the book is clearly written for the In Nomine universe, with all the carefully intertwined politics and complexities that the universe involves, its greatest strength lies in its flexibility for multiple campaigns, In Nomine or not.
Appearance
The book is 126 pages, with black and white contents and drawings. The style of art is much like that in the other In Nomine books, simple and faintly cartoony without being flippant or ridiculous. I'll admit I like this style of black-line drawings, with occasional grey shading, partly because I can indulge my artistic side and color in the pictures with crayon myself. While this isn't everyone's cup of tea, I certainly recommend it as an activity for making reading new gaming books even more fun.
With the exception of map diagrams for a few of the more complex areas, the illustrations tend towards giving a general sense or 'slice of life' for an area, rather than attempting to portray the entire area in one image. Often these pictures are of an NPC mentioned, or simply convey a sense of the location; the picture of a grinning Habbalite arms dealer provides a much better idea of what his weapons stock is like than a picture of the entire location would. The few building layouts are simple and clean, and appear quite easy to photocopy and magnify for use with combat, though I haven't tested this on a photocopier myself.
Because this book is purely one of concepts, people, places, and not mechanics, the text inside the usual In Nomine style of boxes doesn't contain charts, optional rules, or side notes, nearly so often as it has a snippet of flavor text of some sort. These range from Celestial want ads ("Wanted: workable plan to infiltrate the Glade with some decent disco music") to excerpts from a campus newspaper to the usual snippets of fiction. While most of the fiction bits are entirely unrelated, being a paragraph or two of flavor for the particular location, a few are snapshots of a continuing plot scattered through the book, touching upon location after location. This is never made explicit, but it's certainly a fun puzzle to work out what the story is based on the little hints given here and there; not a necessary part of the book, but a nice treat, as it were.
Places
The meat of the book lies, as the title would suggest, in its locations. These vary wildly, and are arranged by planes--corporeal, ethereal, celestial (with division between infernal and angelic)--for easy reference. Within each plane places are arranged alphabetically and divided by affiliation (heaven, hell, and disputed, respectively). The table of the contents in the front means places can be found at a glance, and a more extensive index in the back lets one look up particular NPCs, where certain locations are referred to in the descriptions of other locations, and so on. It's a handy way of organizing things in such an eclectic collection.
This isn't a book of generic taverns and castles, or (in a more appropriately modern sense) gas stations and hotels. Everything from grocery stores to airports to Heaven's coffee shops and Hell's restaurants, and a flying cathedral you'll really have to read for yourself to appreciate, the places in this book all have stories behind them. The stories range from amusingly simple--the restaurant in Hell where demons torture vegetables--to complex and evocative, such as the place in Novalis' glade in Heaven, where souls that haven't yet finished their mourning go to weep undisturbed by the joy around them. Personally, I find locations in Heaven and Hell difficult to come up with, so those particular sections are especially useful, but there are plenty of places to go around on every plane, even the ethereal.
In short, the diversity of the places offered are a delight to the soul. I have my own favorites--the plastic dinosaur factory, the 'perfectly logical' airport--but none that I dislike, or even find boring, though there are some that definitely give me the creeps. If there's anything that's lacking, it's a scope outside of the North America/ Europe setting, as the places all seem to assume one of those areas as a setting, but I doubt this will prove an inconvenience to many GMs; at worst, the places just need a little tweaking to give them the flavor of a different culture. Though the places are detailed and specific, they're quite easy to drop in different parts of the country; if you want your group of PCs to get to the Goldenrod Bookshop in Pittsburgh, and they decide to make a detour to Los Angeles instead, it can just as easily be placed there with no one the wiser.
People
The second area in which this book excels is its NPCs, all conveniently attached to plot hooks, the locations they're written up with, and bits of personality and/or history to weave into a campaign. These aren't statted NPC write-ups--I would recommend the Liber Servitorum, if that's what you're more interested in--but this both saves space and allows for more easy conversion to other gaming systems, as required. This is an In Nomine book, so NPCs are presented as such, with all the complications that brings with it, but many, if not all, of them can be used in other settings with a few changes to the 'who' behind their primary motivations and agendas.
As you might expect, the characters presented in the book are closely tied to the places they accompany. They range from celestials to soldiers to unaware humans, with the odd ghost, ethereal, or sorcerer thrown in to keep things interesting. Many of them are quite 'ordinary', by one standard or another, but this doesn't mean they're boring; even the perfectly ordinary antique shop owner has a clear personality quickly defined with just enough information that he can be pulled out and played easily by a GM without much time to spare. Being connected to their locations, many of them will lose a great deal of what makes them special if removed from their settings, but they're seldom so very connected as to keep a GM from pulling them for handy NPCs, or using them in other areas as recurring NPCs. (The ghost, being attached to a particular place, is, of course, an exception to this.) And sometimes it's very handy indeed to actually have someone--with a motivation, personality, and background--ready-made for your grocery store manager, chief of police, or neighborhood dentist.
Plots
You Are Here is primarily a book of places, not plots. But this didn't stop them from dangling tempting plot hooks off every other location, whether implied (there are so many things to be done with a demonic arms dealer) or explicit (one suggested plot ends with "this could turn into a blood-bath, or into a Keystone Kops comedy of errors", good for those with light or dark campaign, or anything in-between). Beyond those contained within the location and NPC descriptions, there's also a small section at the end of the book with longer plot suggestions. This is a very short section--by no means containing full adventures--with larger plots that can pull in several locations in the book, for (with any luck) correspondingly less work for the GM, while allowing for players to stumble into any of the other plot hooks attached to those places, for expanded complications.
Overall, the book is more of a do-it-yourself kit than your more common type of setting resource; everything inside is beautifully written with just enough information to intrigue without defining things so precisely as to make the GM feel like she's just using someone else's ideas. While putting these places into a campaign will require some time on the GM's part--as mentioned before, nothing has been statted, so if an NPC is going to be rolling, the GM had better toss together a few forces with the attunements listed before using that NPC--they provide a great deal more than your usual generic sets of locations. This book is the perfect resource for the In Nomine GM who's looking for some new ideas, places, and players, without wanting every plot to be world-changing, or for someone who wants to set a campaign in Heaven or Hell and needs some suggestions for just what's found in those places.
While obviously it won't be as extensively useful for such, You Are Here is also a great resource for GMs not running In Nomine who want to toss in something unusual; many of the plots and NPCs could be easily converted to a weird/horror/fantasy modern campaign with minor tweaking or a little forethought, especially since they're not weighted down with stats to be converted to another system. I myself appreciate it just for the enjoyment I get out of reading the book--I've not had a chance to use these places in running an In Nomine campaign yet--as there are 126 pages of well-written, thought-provoking (and sometimes disturbing) prose to go through. For only $20, it's well worth the price, whether you play In Nomine and GM, or not.
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