----------------------------------------------------------
Bluffside Places: Rogue’s Rest Inn and Tavern is a detailed d20 point of interest from The Explorers' Guild.
Bluffside Places: Rogue’s Rest Inn and Tavern presents a ready to use inn and tavern set in the Old City of Bluffside. It is a 30-page product, with the last 3 pages covering the open gaming license and an advertisement of the Bluffside Ruins Series, while another 7 pages contain the maps.
From the product: “Everyone needs a place to work, a place to live, and places to hang out and get into trouble. The Explorers' Guild's Bluffside Places are fully detailed locations within the city of Bluffside, but can easily be used in any other fantasy setting.
The first in the series is the Rogue's Rest Inn & Tavern, and comes with seven maps, 32 NPCs with backgrounds, descriptions of all the rooms in the Inn and above the stable. CC2Pro files of the maps are also bundled with the PDF, and can be viewed using CC2Pro or the free Viewer/Printer from ProFantasy.
Those who purchase Rogue's Rest will receive links to download several bonus files: color versions of the maps (in gif format), a map of the New City area where the Rogue's Rest is located, and a Rogue's Rest's employee's residence floor plan.
Rogue's Rest Inn & Tavern is 30 pages long with cover, including a new prestige class, a new magic item, and sells for $5.00.”
This is the exactly the kind of product a D&D 3.5 DM needs for memorable campaigns. Rogue’s Rest Inn and Tavern provides a fully fleshed inn and tavern with its maps, working practices, personnel, clients and a lot more. It provides a few story seeds, an attractive background, a place for the characters to call their own. The fact that it is located in Bluffside is irrelevant, since it can be easily adapted to a city of that size.
The product starts from describing the location along with a usual inn menu with prices. There is a variety of rooms to be summarily described like the private ones, the bathing room, two gaming rooms, the sitting room etc. The stable is also described, since the inn provides lodging for the animals. The story of the owner is given in detail, along with short descriptions of employees and regulars. Finally, a new prestige class dealing with burglary and thus being more useful in city based campaigns, the cat burglar, is presented up to level 5. Twists that not need mentioned in this review make the inn substantially more useful than a simple place to spend a night. In effect, I can imagine full campaigns being run with the inn as the focal point.
The product is typo free. Rules wise it looks solid, since this is not a playtest review though I haven’t checked the NPCs in real working conditions. Reading them thoroughly does not raise any obvious red flags.
A common complaint about D&D 3.5 is that stats take substantially more space than the actual descriptions and this product is no exception. Of course, this is not a weak point of the product since it advertises itself as a detailed d20 point of interest as opposed to a generic inn to be incorporated in any system. People searching for the latter might want to consider the high number of pages devoted to the statistics of the characters.
The only poor point of this product is its relatively bland and not easy to read maps. Although they are drawn in black and white, they will be provided in colour for free for those purchasing the pdf. I admit I don’t see the added value in this offer and feel that the coloured versions should have been included in the first place.
In conclusion, this product is a welcome addition to the d20 library. It can be used as it is in a variety of cases, not to mention its reusability in different d20 campaigns as the building block of a typical inn.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The 2012 re-examination: definitely useful. I am currently using it for a BRP based game, even though this means that as a customer I am losing the value of the d20 statistics. With minor modifications the creative GM can have numerous inns at his disposal, having used this one as a template. Worth the money.
