Bard's
Gate
A City Sourcebook for V3.5
Roleplaying
Necromancer Games has been one of the biggest
publishers of adventure modules for the d20 system. While most of
them are fairly generic, they all tend to be set in the same
gameworld. This mostly consists of having the same gods and
referring to other Necromancer Games modules, but many of them do
mention a city called "Bard's Gate".
Due to this frequent mention of the city, people have been
expecting a sourcebook for Bard's Gate for some time. Since 2001
at least ("Tomb of Abysthor" mentions the sourcebook as
forthcoming, along with an adventure called "The Wrath of
Orcus"). But it finally has seen the light of day in 2006.
Was it worth the wait?
Well, honestly, probably not. But what sort of thing does live up
to that long a wait? Still, it is a good solid fantasy city,
really only suffering from some blandness.
City Background
Bard's Gate is basically an independent city-state, ruled by a
Burgess (one step below "Burger Queen", apparently).
It's set in something of a wilderness area, along a trade route
between two larger cities. It's a medium sized city, 20,000 to
35,000 people, depending on the time of year. It's about 800
years old, but doesn't have a heck of a lot of history (the
timeline of history is pretty much in one small box).
In D&D, at least 3.x, cities have Alignments much like
characters which sort of define how they operate ethically and
morally. Bard's Gate is listed as being Chaotic Good, but
seemingly differs from what I would think of as a Chaotic Good
city. For instance, slavery seemingly is tolerated (which is
neither good nor chaotic). There are fairly strict weapons and
armor control laws. Rather than commerce being laiz faire, there
are a staggering number of guilds, many of them overlapping.
There's also a fairly strong police presence, as well as a number
of private guards. All in all which would probably make the place
Lawful Neutral at best.
The City Itself
The city has 16 different districts, each of which gets a
chapter. This part of the book makes up about 100 pages.
Generally speaking, there's an overview of the district, followed
by writeups of notable locations. Lesser NPCs have just their
basic stats listed in the text (attributes and level and hp)
while more important ones have full write ups in the back.
Locations generally get a few paragraphs devoted to them and
mostly describe the place and its staff (and what drinks are
served). For the most part it's good enough, though I would have
liked to have seen some mention of who the regular patrons are.
The people who run the place, especially a bar/tavern only make
up part of the experience - the other customers are very
important to.
A handful of locations do get a much more detailed treatment,
including maps and room by room descriptions. These are generally
the more important locations. For instance, a high priced Inn, a
couple temples, a casino.
It's a fairly typical city. There are good sections, there are
bad sections. There's a market section and a temple section.
Thieves' Quarter. And docks. Usual stuff. Not all typical,
though. One of the more unique districts is the Bard's College.
Which is what the City is named after, I guess.
There is some silliness in some entries. For instance, there is
something like a rock group. A bunch of barbarians called
"The Accursed" perform at a bar in the Bard's College
area, and it says that young female fans throw undergarments on
stage as they perform. Kinda goofy.
Other oddities include a tavern run by female paladins, a
leprechaun shoemaker, a sculptor who makes gargoyles (possibly a
reference to Clark Ashton Smith's tales), a cannibalistic
pie-maker, and a lothario halfling (which I have some trouble
believing would be desirable to adult human women, but then
again, they do have big feet, so maybe...).
It's all very interesting, but I would have liked to have seen
something like an adventurer's guide to places. That is, sort of
a listing of which shops they should visit, which temples provide
things like raise dead to them, which wizards will do the same
with stone to flesh and the like. A lot of that stuff is in the
descriptions, but you have to pour through and take notes. But
those things are what the PCs will likely be looking for.
More bars/taverns would also have been nice. As would adventure
hooks for various places.
The Adventures
Two site based adventures are included. One is right in the heart
of the city, and has the PCs investigating just what happened to
the old Thieves' Guild (it died out somewhat mysteriously, and
everyone who goes in, never comes out). The second is a gnoll
lair outside of town.
I really like the one about the Thieves Guild. It uses a lot of
custom monsters, so the PCs won't know what to expect. (Though there is some confusion about the nature of the monsters, are they undead or outsiders, so the DM might be a bit baffled as well). It also
has a pretty good reward, because if they clear it out,
presumably they now have a pretty swanky base in the middle of
the city (albeit it's not clear who owns it anymore, if
"finders, keepers" doesn't apply to houses).
The gnoll one is good if your PCs want to attack a gnoll fort.
Which never did much to me personally, but some might get a kick
out of it. It's fairly intelligently designed, so not a pushover.
The Gods of Bard's Gate
The modules from Necromancer uses a common group of Deities. Some
are fairly standard D&D-ish and are derived from Mythology or
certain fantasy writings. Orcus, Tyche, Hecate and Bacchus from
Roman/Greek mythology. Some Norse gods like Hel and Freya and
Thyrm. A couple Egyptian ones, Set and Ra. Gromm seems
suspiciously like the Crom of Conan, though maybe not. Tsathogga,
borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith.
No stats (and thus not very 1st Edition-ish), just a description
and their domains, alignment, symbol, etc.
Other Stuff
There's a few new magic items, including a magical deck of cards
which is pretty neat. The Deck of Prophecy, which doesn't
actually fortell the future, so much as affect future events that
are asked about. Some cards will give a bonus to certain die
rolls involving that event, others give penalties.
A couple new classes - The Beggar and the Shadowmask. Both are
somewhat flawed, I think. The Beggar is supposedly an NPC class,
but misses the mark in realizing that NPCs classes are meant to
be simpler than PC classes, not necessarily just weaker. So while
it's weaker, it also has a bunch of special abilities, so it's a
pain to actually make characters with.
The Shadowmask is a prestige class. Sort of a super-rogue. It
uses a non-standard base attack bonus progression, something
which really really irks me, and is generally a bad idea unless
there is a good reason. There isn't one, I can see.
There are some new monsters, including some from the Tome of
Horrors updating to 3.5 stats.
Layout/Art
It pretty much looks like every other Necromancer Games product.
Fairly big margins, a lot of white space, but a very clean and
nice looking layout that is easy to read. Good use of bold and
larger, readable (ie, not too fancy) fonts for titles.
One thing they continue to do, which really irks me, is include
the stats in the back of the book, and instead of giving you an
exact page, just say "See NPC Appendix". Just how hard
is it to say "see page xxx", instead? Yes, it takes
some work to find the exact page number, but less than a minute
or three each, and they had what, 5 years?
To make things worse, the NPCs in the NPC Appendix appear in a
different order than they do in the main book. Or at least, the
chapters do. So basically, if you plan on using the book, you'll
want to write page numbers in.
Also weirdly, is that the NPC Appendix sometimes has a lot more
information than just stats. Sometimes not.
The art is somewhat underwhelming. I would say a good chunk of
the art in Necromancer Games products is done by one artist,
Brian LeBlanc, who is also very very good. For some reason, he
doesn't appear in this book. Instead are a bunch of different
artists. They all seem to have a similar sort of style, which
gives the product a coherent feel, but some are better than
others. Indeed, some have a lot of trouble with faces or just
people as a whole. It's not a bad looking book, but neither is it
good looking, either.
It also comes with a pull out (actually attached to the book by gum, in a nice touch, not perforations) poster map of the city. Pretty nice, but would have been nice if the flip side had a player's version (without labels).
Final Musings
It's a good, solid city usable in the majority of D&D
settings. Kind of disappointing that there was no artwork from
Brian LeBlanc, who illustrated so many of the original
Necromancer Games adventures. Including the Tomb of Abysthor,
which is a product you probably want to use in conjunction with
this, since it's right nearby the city.
On the other hand, it was a bit sparse for a city book. So many
sections of the city, but so few pages per section on average.
And where are the random encounter tables? How can you have a
city book with "1st Edition Feel" without random
encounter tables?
If you compare it to the book I think really set the bar for d20
city books, Bluffside, it's pretty lacking in small touches as
well (Like patrons of businesses, adventure hooks for every
location, etc). But this book is far, far more generic and thus
actually more useful to the average DM. Overall, I call it a B-,
a B if it had a better layout
Review Summary