EZG reviews Urban Dressing: Docks
This installment of the Urban Dressing-series is 13 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 8 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?
We kick off this installment of Urban Dressing with a massive 100-entry-table of characteristics and appearances of docks – from gibbets with rotten remains to different offices and buildings, we get quite some variety here. Unfortunately, though, several of the entries in this table are generic to a fault – “A large dock dominated by imposing naval ships.”, “This dock is a frenzied hive of activity.” – while there are a bunch of cool entries here, it’s extremely generic entries like the examples that slightly detract from this table’s appeal.
After one b/w-page vista of a harbor, we get a table with 100 entries to generate randomly docked ships – and the ship’s names are cool and varied and avoid the standard clichés of names – so two thumbs up here! The same can be said about the 20 hooks and complications provided – they universally make for interesting diversions/sidetreks a DM can develop and expand.
The best table of the book, though, would be the 50-entry-strong d%-table of sights and sounds to lend details to docks – with fresh lobster, performing bards and playing children, we get a massive, interesting table here that will provide ample opportunities for DMs to use. Finally, we get 10 fluff-only write-ups of NPCs to populate spontaneously your docks.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP’s 2-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes with nice artwork and in two versions, one optimized for screen-use and one to be printed out. The pdfs come fully bookmarked for your convenience.
Brian Liberge delivers a good installment of the Urban Dressing here, with some neat, detailed tables. The first table is the only one of the tables in this product that falls a bit short of what I would have expected and honestly, I wished the NPCs had been cut in favor of another thing absent from the pdf – a dock-generator for the whole harbor: Essentially a table to roll the amount of places where large ships can anchor etc. – a meta-generator for the layout of the overall docks. That being said, the absence of that one does not hurt the pdf too much and hence I still feel comfortable of rating this pdf at a good 4 stars.
You can get this here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop!
Endzeitgeist out.
