Common Ground 1 is a small supplement designed to make it easy to quickly generate a church, inn, or merchant shop or caravan in the middle of an adventuring session. Note that I received a review copy of this from rpg.net, but I don't think I've let that impair my judgement.
What You Get
The book itself is a 32-page staple-bound softcover. The front cover shows several sheets of paper on a desk along with writing tools; unfortunately parts of it which are pixillated reveal the fact that its source was a computer image and the whole thing isn’t entirely convincing.
The interior is notable for being entirely printed on slick magazine-style paper. Most of it is in black and white, with a little interior art, except for the central 4-page colour map section. The interior art is mostly of appropriate objects - shop shelves, a book, a cauldron - but not very inspired.
The book is divided into several sections, as follows:
- Table of Contents (1 page)
- Churches (8 pages)
- Inns (7 pages)
- Merchants (7 pages)
- Color Maps (4 pages)
- Extra worksheets (4 pages)
- Ad (1 page)
Each of the three main sections is set up in a very similar fashion. As an example, the Church section goes over choosing a size and map for the church, general alignment, priest, acolytes, race, gender and name for NPCs, religious domains, and NPC spells. There are 6 priest writeups (i.e. stat and equipment blocks) and 5 acolytes, whose selection is dependent on the size of the church.
The color map section provides 3 small maps for each of the possible size of building and type, thus 27 in all.
Commentary
To get right to my opinion of this product: I think it's mostly a waste of paper - there just isn't much content here.
Let’s take another look at that section on churches (8 pages total), and this time break it down page by page.
- A section title page with a 1/2 page image of a church, followed by an explanation of "how to use this section"
- A page with blurbs about choosing church size, map, and alignment (1/2 page) and a table of doors, locks, and traps (1/2 page)
- Two pages for cleric and acolyte writeups, including combat values, attributes, languages, equipment, and wealth.
- One page for choosing race and gender. Basically half a page of content summarizing the standard racial modifiers, along with names for males and females of each race.
- One page for choosing domains, basically a list of the standard domains as found in the PHB
- One page for selecting spells. Has summarized lists of spells for "good" and "evil" clerics
- One Instant Churches Worksheet. Half the worksheet is made up of places to write down info on the church (size, map, domains, etc) and population. The other half is taken up by another summary of the racial modifiers, and good and evil spell lists
Now, if you can imagine this section copied and tweaked for inns and merchants, you pretty much have the entire book. In fact, it's perfectly obvious that the intro text for each section was simply duplicated and then changed to refer to the appropriate venues. Each section also repeats the tables for racial modifiers on both a separate page, and as a part of their worksheet. The SRD material as a whole could probably all have fit on a single pullout sheet, leaving more room for original content while still being quickly accessible.
There are a few added distinctions for inns and merchants - they have a level of affluence as well as size, which affects the staff, patrons, and prices. I did particularly like the price markups for merchants. The writeups for the NPCs at these places include suggested possible positions - a cleric at an inn might be a local priest, adventurer, spy, or mystical madman.
But it's too little for the product as a whole: I count 4 pages taken up by section introductions (the first of the four colour map pages is a repetition of the front cover), about 5 pages of material taken from the SRD, and 3 pages of "extra worksheets" which will only be useful to someone who doesn't have time to reach a photocopier before they first use the book. When you include the advertisement for an upcoming module, that’s 13 pages of fluff in a 32-page supplement, which is hardly impressive.
The maps are, sadly, a waste of colour. They're all very small, and while it's true that the colour makes it easy to distinguish the map features, none of them are large enough to actually be used as is (given that they're at the scale of about 1/8th of an inch per 5'). That means that if you're going to actually use any of the maps (for combat, should it occur) you're going to have to photocopy and enlarge them, or draw your own larger version. I doubt many people will be making colour photocopies, considering how expensive those still are.
There is a lot more that a product like this could be. Common Ground I will let you quickly create the buildings it says it does, I'll grant that, but they're not going to be very exciting. Aside from the possible positions for NPCs, there's nothing to create any individuality. Lists of possible notable traits for NPCs and buildings might have made it easy to characterize these quickly-created locations.
As a final note, I assume that Bard's Productions arrived at a price of $12 for this product because of the glossy and colour paper - $9 or $10 seems to be more typical for 32-page supplements. It only makes the lack of content within all the more galling.
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