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Seven Cities came out a while ago (March 2002), when some of the smarter d20 publishers were looking for things other than adventures to publish. It had been preceded by Seven Strongholds and was followed by Seven Civilizations and Sacred Ground I and II; all books detailing generic locations that could be easily dropped into almost any fantasy d20 campaign.
The title Seven Cities is a bit misleading, because this book doesn’t describe seven cities, but rather seven settlements of various sizes: a thorp, hamlet, village, small town, large town, small city, and large city. The eighth D&D3 category of settlement, metropolis, was considered too extensive to be dealt with in just one chapter of this book; a well done metropolis would require a book to itself. It doesn’t even attempt to detail every single building in the smaller settlements it covers (in the manner of Judge’s Guild’s City States), with the exception of the smallest: the thorp (population 50 adults and 15 children). Instead, it describes a sample of the buildings in each settlement, including both average and interesting examples, and employing a neat trick to increase the number of descriptions that can fit within on its pages.
But first the basics. Seven Cities is a 144-page (including two pages of ads in the back), perfect bound book. The cover isn’t particularly interesting, but the frequent maps (by John Davis, Rob Lee, and Scott Reeves) are clean and functional, and the less common illustrations (by Michael Clark, John Davis, Brian Figur, and Jennifer Meyer) are generally good, although some seem a bit out of focus. There’s a table of contents, a list of maps, and a one-page index of the Open Content. There’s some white space at the bottoms of columns and the ends of chapters, and the book follows Atlas Games’ annoying practice of reprinting the entire text of abilities like low-light vision in the stat box of every NPC with the ability (despite the fact that most D&D players and DMs likely to buy this book have either a pretty good grasp on such common abilities or a Player’s Handbook to refer to if they’re momentarily confused), but overall the book doesn’t have a padded look.
The book opens with a multi-page introduction that discusses the definitions of settlement sizes, goods and services found in communities, hazards (such as disease and fire), and tables with typical population breakdowns by class and level for each size of community.
Then there are the chapters for each community. Along with an overall map of the community, there are also a number of smaller floor plans of individual buildings of note in each community. Not every building comes with a floor plan, just the ones that either benefit most from a diagram or that would be most interesting to adventuring PCs; e.g., in the thorp there are no diagrams for the homes of the tanner, the fishmonger, the stable-owner, etc., but there are floor plans for the stable, the church, the inn, and the tavern (including its outhouse, which is a bit odd since none of the other buildings in the book take note of such features, either as out-buildings or marked rooms inside; maybe it’s chamberpots and the bushes everywhere else, making this outhouse an innovation that just wasn’t picked up in the larger communities).
Along with a description of each physical location, there are also NPCs associated with each place. They’re given only the minimum of stats required to make proper use of them, which can mean two lines for some (e.g., instead of a full stat block for the thorp’s inn owner, we’re given her race, class, level, alignment, hit points, and Bluff and Sense Motive scores) and a page or more for others (e.g., a total of five pages of stats for the two major NPCs of the large city and their associated familiars, etc.). But more importantly, each of the NPCs is described in text that gives their background, mentions links with other characters in the community, their habits, their secrets, their conflicts, and so on, giving the DM what he needs to make the communities more than places to buy cure spells and wait at the bar for their next assignment.
One interesting stat for most of the businesses is a box listing the prices for goods and services. Instead of taking up space with price lists, most are listed simply as a percentage difference from standard Player’s Handbook prices. The majority sell at 100% standard, and for the few who don’t there are usually explanations for why they differ (e.g., the general store in the thorp sells at 90% standard in order to try attract people to the thorp itself, but the proprietor refuses to sell anything in the store that can also be found at a specialized shop in the community (e.g., musical instruments sold by the retired bard); because he doesn’t want to Wal-Mart them out of business).
Each community has about a dozen fully-described locations, with the smaller communities having slightly more than a dozen, and the larger slightly less, but as each of those locations takes longer to describe in a bigger settlement (both because the buildings themselves are more complex, and because the NPCs associated with them have longer stat blocks), the chapters increase in length even as the number of locations per chapter drops.
But a dozen or fewer locations is hardly enough detail to make a town or city useful. This is where the trick I mentioned earlier comes into play: Seven Cities increases the number of location descriptions in each community by recycling.
For instance, while the chapter on the hamlet has 14 new locations dedicated to it, the hamlet map has 30 numbered locations on it (and 19 unnumbered ones). The locations that are introduced in the hamlet are numbered H1-H14, while the other 16 numbered locations are selected locations from the previous chapter describing the thorp; e.g., T17, Aristocrat’s Home. Instead of paying for a new description of an aristocrat’s home (and a new map) that’s mostly the same but slightly different from the one a few pages earlier, the DM can just refer back to the original one in the thorp chapter, reusing the floor plan and the stats of the NPCs there, with just a touch of tweaking to make them different (after all, the Half-Moon Tavern is going to be similar but not identical to the Pig & Whistle). And if the DM has never actually used the thorp, he can appropriate indicated material from it without any tweaking at all (although in either case he should write notes about what has or hasn’t been used in which version, just in case he should decide to use the previously unused thorp at a later date).
Although it’s obvious that material from two communities of similar size (e.g., small town and large town) can be easily recycled, the technique is surprisingly useful even at extreme ends of the scale, such that the 14 of the thorp’s 29 numbered locations appear on the map of the large city, some multiple times (e.g., two blacksmiths, two scribes, and three moneylenders). Although it requires some page-flipping and some note-taking on the DM’s part, this technique probably about doubles the effective utility of the book.
For those interested in how much d20 crunch the book has, Seven Cities is about 40% Open Content. Most of this consists of things like community and NPC stats, but there are four new magic items, four new traps, rules for burning down buildings and NPC healers, the aforementioned tables of NPC distribution in communities of different sizes, and a few other bits and pieces (e.g., How do you know you’ve entered the royal quarter of the large town? At dusk, lamplighters go around opening the shutters on the lampposts with the continual flames cast at their tops. Of course, in the large city all the streets have such lampposts, except for in the slums, where they were stolen.). Not a lot for the munchkins, but they’re not this book’s target market.
Despite the fact that Seven Cities is three years old now and unlikely to be available at your local game store, it’s a book that holds up well over time. Even the fact that it’s written for D&D3.0 instead of 3.5 shouldn’t be too much of a problem unless you’re the sort of DM who would, for example, worry about the fact that the ranger running one of the taverns in the small town has saves of +4/+1/+2 instead of +4/+5/+2 and is short one feat and a special ability that’s unlikely to come into play in a bar brawl anyway. If you can find it get it by special order or online it’s well worth even its full cover price.
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