Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Half a pound of heroin,
Half a pound of treacle,
That's the way the story goes,
Out comes the evil.

Lords of Acid, Out Comes the Evil

Shelzar: City of Sins is a sourcebook for the city of the same name, the third of the line of city books for the continent of Ghelspad (following on the heels of Mithril and Hollowfaust), the central setting for Sword & Sorcery Studios' d20 efforts. It weighs in at 124 pages, softcover, with black and white interior, and at the time of this review, it retails for US$ 21.95. While not anything spectacular in the way of setting material, it is a solid book with much to offer the Ghelspadian campaign, and enough meat to pare off and drop liberally into the debauched port of your choice.

As far as technical execution goes, the book is solid. The cover captures the feel of the setting (and even offers a reclining woman) without resorting to cheesecake. The interior art (as much of Scarred Lands material sports) is A-grade, with several line art pieces by Steve Ellis. Maps are nearly non-existant (only three, one showing the outlying area, and two overviewing the entire city), and the contrast on them could have used a bump or two in the gamma department. (Dark, dark, dark.) In an odd piece of recycling, the chapter head pages are blown-up, darkened, (and pixelated) portions of the Ghelspad PDF map. The book also sports the now ubiquitous dark (dark!) border art, rendering the margins useless for marginalia. (Note to layout-type-people: Some of us like to use margins, and don't need extra eye-candy to distract from the actual words on the page.) Overall, a solid B for look-and-feel.

Shelzar, as the introduction informs us, contains "[s]ex, drugs, violence and perversity, [...] they can certainly add spice to mature fantasy roleplaying." (p. 3) This, I cannot disagree with. The book contains boxed-out asides regarding 'sex constructs', and there are merchants detailed who peddle nothing but S&M equipment. Anthony Pryor, the developer, also tells us in the introduction that he feels that "in doing so, we have shown taste and decorum" (p. 3). This is also something that I can agree with. The book, even when describing the sexual equivalent of a gibbering mouther (I'll let the reader's imagination take over from there), goes out of its way not to titter behind its metaphorical hand. For this, I give the writers high marks.

However, there's a sense throughout the book that something is being held back. For once in my RPG-reading life, I wanted to see a piece or two of fiction to try and enliven the prose. The material comes off dry, even when describing what is supposed to be a decadent and debauched society. While I realize that there is a certain limit that the writers had to respect without slapping a MATURE CONTENT label on the book, I think that they could have pushed the envelope a little more than they did. More than that, however, the descriptions of the city lack a sensual quality that would have helped to ease the reader into the right frame of mind.

An exellent example of this can be found in the Adazi District, home of the Perfumed Garden, where "patrons ... can select any number of exotic sexual partners, including even [sic] constructs and the undead. It is in fact the perfume with which the undead are covered that gives the place its name." (p.63). This passage, so ripe with possibility, sounds more like a throwaway entry in a Fodor's Guide. In trying to show restraint, the writers have also robbed the book of most of its potential flavor, like a filet mignon made out of oyster crackers. I'm not advocating long treatises on paedophilia or charts for venereal diseases - these are the other extreme, the tittering that I talked about earlier. But a lot could have been done to bring the city of Shelzar (a very interesting place) to more vibrant life.

In the end, this makes Shelzar an excellent seed-generator for other campaigns, and for the GM who can bring these sorts of scenes to life themselves. But the book doesn't offer much in the way of inspiration - and mostly because it tries a shade too hard not to offend.