Denizens of the Empire
Free for download at D-Constructions: http://www.steved.org/roleplaying/rules.html
By Steve Darlington and Jody MacGregor.
Denizens of the Empire is a free PDF available from D-Constructions detailing more than 60 new characters suitable for the Warhammer Fantasy Game. This is not a playtest review. The book is well laid out and edited with a single character to each page. Barring a small border on the bottom of the chapter introduction pages, about 12 in total, the design is ink sparing if you factor the copious stat blocks as a necessity.
OVERVIEW: You can’t beat free can you? In truth, free and poorly done is something I do not have time for – thankfully, Denizens does not fall into that category. DotE handles the boring number crunching stuff but it goes one great big step further, it also creates some memorable and fun characters. All entries are given a paragraph or so of tightly written background text replete with numerous hooks and adventure ideas. If the goal of an NPC book is to provide characters that DMs want to insert into their game then this book is a smashing success.
ART: Art is mostly absent from this product with the exception of the bottom border that appears on the chapter pages. There was some use of fonts to give the book an old school appearance. Again, with free stuff the worst case is for the author to include terrible, amateurish art, IMO no art is better than bad art. What art that gets used is good.
CHAPTERS: The book is divided by character origin and includes the Upper-class, Agents of the Empire, City Folk, Country Folk, Serving Classes, Criminal Classes, The Insane, and a few others including monsters. Each entry contains about half-a-dozen characters that range in experience from just starting to one character with 6,000 experience points. They include a broad range of classes and advanced classes.
City Folk is my favorite chapter. The chapter includes characters like Hargin Hook-Hand, the one armed retired gladiator who bought the arena and converted it into an inn. Next up is Gerhardt Ten Fingers – renowned for keeping all his parts while working on black-powder weapons. The chapter also includes a fence whom few like to deal, an unlikely insurgent, and a physician who works cheap for adventures, if you don’t mind holding still while she draws a diagram of your liver before putting in the stiches.
The PDF includes organizational indexes in about every system available including alphabetical, by race, by class, and by level. This is both mildly surprising and very useful. In fact, I used it more than a few times and all I was doing is a review.
Finally, the book finishes off with a humorous test to determine the worth of your doctor. Maybe it was just me (I am a nurse) but the test could do some serious damage to an otherwise credible supplement but the humor was well done and remarkably accurate.
GOOD: Creative writing and inventive backgrounds make this a supplement worth reading.
NEUTRAL: Obviously, it is hard to hold lack of art and other fancy wing-dings against a free supplement.
BAD: Not much here. The book could have tightened up the layout and stat blocks to save paper and ink but they are not huge offenders either.
