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Treasures of Freeport

This review is for the 47-page PDF, Treasures of Freeport, written by Michael Hammes, published by Ronin Arts, and currently available online through RPGnow for $6.50.

Target Audience: Game Masters using Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport: The City of Adventure campaign setting.

Rating: Keeping in mind this is a niche product aimed at a very specific market its lack of generic utility should not be held against it. Therefore, despite a general lack of usefulness to any but Freeport GMs, combined with the fact Treasures of Freeport does provide more than average content for it’s targeted campaign milieu it rates 7 out of 10 coveted golden apples.

The first thing that sticks out about this product is the illustrations. There is an art to photo-shopping that few can master. More than that it is rare to see a truly interesting technique. We’ve all seen the badly put together photo collages with rough pixilated edges or improper use of the smear tool intended to cover up a few minor sins but instead creating a host of others. Here we have something else altogether. At a glance some of the illustrations look like quickie scribbles over poser images with multi layered filters applied, and maybe that’s precisely what the artist did, then again the end result is worthy of being called artwork. So much for first impressions, now on to the game material!

Appraisal

Products that are little more than collections of treasure items, spells, or lists of feats are notoriously difficult to assess. By the very nature of role-playing games the ultimate value of a magic bauble, skill, or spell resides in its usefulness. At least in game terms and therein lays the problem. Every game is unique and subject to the foibles of the Game Master, who ultimately decides what “useful” means. Yet whether something is useful to a Game Master, or player, is a totally subjective matter that will, does, and always varies from game session to game session. Indeed how does one objectively determine whether or not constrictor gloves, a blue pearl, shark bracelet, coral flute, or a loupe of translation may or may not be suited for use within campaigns of which I, the reviewer, know nothing about? All I can really say is that the write-ups appear to be well written, there are dozens of entries, but as I neither own nor have played in the Freeport setting I can not honestly evaluate how well this material fits into that setting anymore than I can tell a Game Master reading this whether or not they should rush out and buy it or ignore it altogether. Luckily reviewers business is offering opinions, not just evaluations, for I can honestly say it is my opinion that Treasures of Freeport looks like it should be useful to any Game Master running Freeport. Note that. Because if you are running a Grey Hawk, Hawkmoon, Isles of Mist, Avalon, Dragonlance, Gamma World, Lord of the Rings, or a campaign of the Great and Feared Dodo then very little of the treasures listed herein are going to be useful to you without much adaptation.

Negatives: It’s just one massive Treasure Tome. Granted it’s been a long time but I have to ask: Why weren’t these treasures enumerated? I mean say I want to just roll on a chart to determine a treasure at random? As a former DM who relied on random treasure charts for a modicum of fairness I wouldn’t find this product very helpful. Then again I came from a different era of DM, we were more self-reliant and tended to create our own items, spells, and whatnot as needed. So I suppose I could write numbers in the margins to make it work. . . Oh, wait, this is a PDF! I’d have to waste paper to print it out first.

Positives: This is one massive tome of treasures! There’s a megaton of treasure items, pretty eye candy illustrations, no immediately discernable problems with the PDF aside from an ungodly small font (viewed on screen), and the document layout is just too nice-looking for words. If you are a Freeport DM who doesn’t have the time to create treasures on the fly then you’ll probably want this.

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