Review of Player’s Guide to the Crossroads

The Player’s Guide to the Crossroads somewhat fills the role that in previous editions various Gazetteer’s would do. For example, Greyhawk and the Scarred Lands with their 32 page booklets that provided a board overview of the setting without getting into minutia. This book is similar save that it’s for the Midgard campaign setting and focuses on the region close to Zobeck, a city that has seen much support. This provides Game Masters and Players running Zobeck to expand a bit without having to sink into the larger purchases.

While the book is noted at 36 pages, that’s due to the PDF nature. We have a great cover by Pat Loboyko featuring a some type of either skaven or wererat doing some crime with a host of rats and some henchmen around. Unfortunately for them in the background we see cats and what appears to be a cat burglar. Then there’s a one page table of contents and list of credits followed by a bulk of text and solid art that ends with a full page for the OGL and man does this product quote from everywhere! The art being in full color is a nice touch. There are several solid pieces. They are not like the cover though, being a touch more ‘comic’ style in that they are line drawings for the most part colored in. One of the notable exceptions to this is a frontal view of a city with a massive tree-mountain with numerous domiciles carved into it. It’s a fantastic piece and would be great to view as an actual piece of art.

As a product to view, it’s great. As a product to print it fails. There needs to be a printable version. The whole product is full color. The background on the pages is tan with border designs adding to that color weight and full color symbols surrounding the page numbers. Again, great for looking at but if you wanted to actually print this thing? Say the prayers over your inkjet.

The book uses the standard two-column layout. The name of the product appears on the even number pages and PG1 on odd number pages. Page numbers are surrounded by a clockwork illustration on the even number pages.

The product has a number of bookmarks that make navigation easy. There are several sections with subsections to insure that you get where you want to go.

While the idea of such a gazetteer may seem to provide a lot of regional and fluff to a campaign, the book is actually packed with a ton of game mechanics. The fluff consists of mainly bits on the cities and regions about Zobeck. The information is enough to provide a rough overview of what’s in the region including some ruler names. The larger piece of fluff that includes numerous adventure seeds is the information on holidays in the region. These adventure seeds allow a creative Game Master to quickly throw some quest based adventurers together quickly.

My personal favorite bits are the inclusion of war wagons! I’ve loved the idea of war wagons, wagons specifically designed to be more resistant to damage and to act, essentially, like miniature platforms to attack your enemy with, ever since I read about them in an Osprey book, The Hussite Wars 1419-1436.

In terms of crunch, this is often crunch with associated fluff. For example, the races come with background, physical description, society, relations, alignment and religion, adventurers, and names as well as the game mechanics.

The three ‘standard’ races of Midgard are presented; gearforged, kobold and darakhul. I say standards because if you’ve seen some of the other books in the Midgard series that involve crunch, chances are you’ve seen game stats for these before.

For those unaware or this is their first look at the setting, the gear forged are a good substitute for the war forged from Eberron. These machine men though differ in background in that they belonged to another race before becoming gear forged. They fit into some of the technology aspect of the setting. Kobolds are well, still the dragon style and are a bit more civilized here but not by much. They are a favorite of the setting as their iconography is used all over the place for the publisher.

Darakhul share some common features of the gear forge in that they used to be something else. Now they are a ghoul subtype. They gain a few features including a nice bite attack but suffer when about in the daylight and have no constitution score among other aberrations in game mechanics.

The book includes a new class, the Shadowsworn. This class has some martial abilities like a rogue but is also a spellcaster. Their rogue abilities tend to be penalized slightly with their back stab capped at +7d6 for example, and their spell selection is limited. These spells come from a wide range of places though so the user, to get the maximum out of them, would have to have access to the Zobeck Gazetteer, Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide, and both Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Magic or the OGL game mechanics from those materials.

There are numerous options for other character classes here. These range from archetypes for paladins and cavaliers, to feats and traits. The traits have a nice break down by various groupings including race, regional, and religion among others. I like how the authors took advantage of existing material as well. For example, for archetypes, they note that for the paladin, the hospitaler would be a good match for paladins of Lada while the shining knight would be suitable for paladins of the order of the undying sun.

Those thirsting for new gear may enjoy the new weapons. This section would have benefited from some illustrations as I’m always the type of person who enjoys seeing exactly what a new weapon is supposed to look like, especially if there are some more standards to compare it to. Many of these new weapons are exotic so player’s won’t be necessarily getting ‘freebies’ with them.

Overall the book is packed with crunch. Some of it repetitive from previous material, some of it relying on ownership of other material to get the most out of it. Game Masters should carefully review everything for their own campaigns before allowing the material in to make sure that they don’t find it overbalanced and that it fits the tone they are going for in their own campaign.