The first one is the Grant Building, a 10-story office building in Hudson City, which happens to be the standard campaign setting for Dark Champions. Thus, it’s immediately clear that Thrilling Places can be used in other HERO System Fifth Edition campaigns as well. The Grant Building has four large tenants (KSL Radio, Superior Insurance Services, the Broadway Secretarial School and Joe’s Diner) and is rumoured to be haunted. It also houses the Danner Detective Agency. Floorplans and 3 NPC’s are included, as well as three plot seeds, but this location feels as if it could use some more detail. The major tenants are only mentioned briefly, which is a shame, and there doesn’t seem to be enough here to call this location ‘thrilling’.
The Hidden City of Pranamoltar is a different story entirely. It is located along the eastern coast of Greenland, in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet. In the subterranean volcanic tunnels, the descendants of a crashed alien expedition toil to keep Pranamoltar functioning. The agoraphobic Molians aren’t warlike, but may frighten humans who find out about their existence. Maps of the five city levels, a complete write-up of High Mentarch Sivarad and four Moleman NPC’s (some of them generic) are included, making this a location which can be dropped into play without a lot of preparation. The Molian technology is pretty funny and very pulp-like, as well. (Incidentally, the aliens – like all good pulp creatures – look very much like humans.)
Northeast of New Guinea lies the Island of the Pale White Lady. Locals from other islands believe it to be uninhabited, even though they shun and fear the place because they think the ghosts of the dead live there. They are wrong, however. It’s difficult to write more about this without giving away any spoilers. Suffice it to say that there are some great villains here. The major adversaries are fully fleshed out, which is a good thing, and the island is definitely fit to use in a major campaign.
K’Hull’s Island is hidden behind a wall of fog. It houses not only immortal monsters from ‘before the dawn of time’, but also the islander’s god, the mighty… K’hong. Yeah, this is a King Kong rip-off. This is pulp. Gotta have a giant ape, right? K’hong’s write-up is pretty good, but the giant ape won’t surprise too many players.
Next up is another classic: the mad scientist determined on perfecting a weird serum. This time, however, we aren’t talking about an island, but about the Laussat Plantation, situated in the Louisiana bayou country. The maps are simple but effective and we get a few important statistic blocks. There’s a nice twist here, as well, which should prove to be a lot of fun when the PC’s discover the truth.
No dinosaur island here (although K’hull Island comes close), but we do get the Pleistocene Plateau. Located in Siberia, here the Ice Age still exists. Pretty much everything and everyone in these wild lands is inhospitable: the weather and climate, the mountains, the creatures and the Neanderthal natives. The plateau is nicely fleshed out and should prove to be a thoroughly exciting location for Player Characters.
The Street of the Emerald Bird is another location set in Hudson City. It has no streets signs and doesn’t appear on maps or city documents. Even though the local Chinese often tell opium-induced stories about dreams coming true here, they have forgotten about its history. There’s something rotten hidden here, and at its heart is the sinister Dr. Fang. The Street of the Emerald Bird is one of the more interesting locations in this book and should be useable in many different campaigns.
Neos Themiscyra, located in sub-Saharan Africa, is another hidden location. This time, the focus isn’t on the place itself, but on its inhabitants. The last surviving Amazons live here, ruled by the jealous and easily-enraged Queen Andromache, who believes the god Artemis speaks to her and counsels her. Sadistic Gamemasters will gleefully drop male PC’s here to be subjugated for a while before allowing them to get out. Nice!
Hudson City’s wealthy and powerful often come to the Pharaoh’s Club to dine, dance and do business. In the club, they are treated like the god-kings who once rules Egypt. This is a nice idea, even though the fairly bland room descriptions take in four of the nine pages devoted to the club. One of the sidebars gives suggestions on how to transplant the location to other cities. Just like is the case in all of the other location descriptions, several plot seeds and NPC’s are included.
Schloss Eisenwolf is a medieval castle overlooking the Danube between Nuremberg and Munich. Even though it isn’t Graf Eisenwolf’s primary residence anymore, it is purportedly home to a legendary artifact. By the way: the rumours are true and the artifact is described and given full game statistics. This would make for the seeds of a good Indiana Jones-type adventure.
Next up is the Royal Viridian Theatre in Hudson City, a lone movie palace on the fringe of the district between North Adams and Caxton Street. Of late, it has been attracting a lot of customers despite of its bad location, and a lot of people have started to wonder how it is able to do that. Recently, New York mobster Vinnie ‘The Axe’ Coletti has tried to wrest control of the theatre from the Tannenbaum family, but he was stopped by the crimebuster known as Raven and the minions of the villainous Iron Claw. Nobody seems to know why Raven and Iron Claw would team up, though, raising even more questions about the place. Thanks to the tie-in with Hudson City characters, the Royal Viridian Theatre is one of the more interesting locations offered within the pages of this book and the mob rivalry going on here should prove very interesting for Dark Champions gamemasters as well.
The Temple of the Dragon is the obligatory secret martial arts school. It’s located in Northern China, but there’s a major twist here. During the 1800’s, the existence of the monastery became known to Dr. Fang Shen, a villain affiliated with the Legion of Crime. Realising he couldn’t spare the years to study at the Temple himself, he made sure his children would be allowed to receive the proper amount of training after saving the people living in the Temple and its surrounding villages from a deadly disease. The chapter describing this location includes lots of interesting stuff, such as some difficult to navigate surrounding terrain features, an evocative account on how the Masters teach their students martial arts and a dangerous Training Maze. Unfortunately, the description of the Temple uses up so much space that there doesn’t seem to have been enough room to include NPC write-ups. Too bad.
Another staple of pulp stories is – of course – the lost tomb, and Thrilling Places gives us one: the Tomb of Kem-Tehenraau-Khanu. The story of the tomb is the story of the warrior mage Kemtehenraau-Khanu and his wife, Mauabu, a priestss of Bast. Both of them served their Pharaoh loyally. Feeling old age creeping up on them, they secured the permission of the Pharaoh to be sealed into a tomb with dark artifacts secured from enemies deemed too dangerous to leave behind. They were mummified, but don’t expect too many horror elements here, since the real adversaries are the Ushabti, a group formed by the children of the couple to defend the tomb. Of course, the option to use mummies is also discussed, making this another interesting location.
Xinca-Hol is another lost location. It’s an ancient Maya city, protected by the descendants of the priests who used to worship Camazotz the bat-god here. The focus in this section is on the surrounding valley, the people who live here and – of course – the sacred bats of Camazotz.
The book closes with a short description of a few other locations, followed by five pages of notes. This does seem to be a waste of space, as not many roleplayers and Gamemasters will want to write inside of the book. The room should probably have been used to flesh out some of the locations. NPC’s could have been included where there are none now and more details would have been nice. Still, the supplement is meant as a starting point and one shouldn’t expect descriptions similar to what can be found in boxed sets devoted to a single location. All in all, despite of a few letdowns, Thrilling Places does its job well enough. The illustrations, however, are not up to par. There aren’t too many of them and most of the NPC’s don’t get any, which is a pity. The maps are fairly basic, but do offer a good enough overview of the terrain or building they represent. Still, if the Hero Games staff has chosen to include fewer illustrations in favour of more information, that’s fine by us. What about those five pages of note, though? Shame, shame, shame...
Dirk Vandereyken
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