Urban Dressing: Trade Town
This installment of what I’d tentatively call the “new” Urban Dressing-series clocks in at 12 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 7 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
The trade town is a trope that is used due to the vast potential inherent in the set-up – the merging of cultures and tropes that is the by-product of such a place ultimately provides a vast panorama of different options for GMs to explore. While unique, the result thus could be inspired, but also lose a distinct identity. With barrels that house hundreds of rats, non-voluntary offering boxes of temples, baying donkeys and town criers and street urchins, over all, we have a significant array of different sights and sounds in the 100-entry strong table.
The second table, with 50 entries, provides 50 businesses, from washer’s guilds to preservative specialists and disease control, the businesses thankfully go quite a bit above and beyond what one would expect from the default of such towns, providing excellent fluff from slave blocks to traffic guides. The third table also provide 50 entries covering different folks that run the whole gamut of different alignments and professions -from good half-orcs to everyday evil and selfish persons to more pure or villainous characters.
Finally, this pdf also sports an array of hooks and complications – more of them than in the previous installment, with no less than 20 entries providing ample material for GMs to kick off modules, encounters and story-quests – why is the manically-laughing man throwing gold coins into a crowd of people? Is he mad or just emulating Egill Skallagrímsson? All up for you to decide! And yes, I urge anyone to read this classic!
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no glitches. Layout adheres to Raging Swan Press’ 2-column b/w-standard and the artwork is thematically fitting b/w-stock. The pdf comes fully bookmarked and in two versions – one optimized for the printer and one optimized for screen-use.
Josh Vogt’s reinvented Urban Dressing-series has become more or less a guarantee for exceedingly high-quality fluff, an inspiring array of options and ultimately, a fun series of supplements. Even in a pdf that suffers from a source-material with a hard-to-grasp identity, he captures the essentials and delivers a concise amount of dressing in the pages of this pdf – and yes, this *IS* a fun, versatile installment that achieves just that – well worth 5 stars + seal of approval!
You can get this great dressing-file here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop!
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Endzeitgeist out.
