EZG reviews Village Backdrops: Summerford
This installment of the Village Backdrop-series is 10 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 5 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?
As in all installments of the village backdrop-series, we get a whole array of supplemental information -from the village statblock to rumors, nomenclature, notable places to information on trade and industry and even dressing habits, the supplement covers quite an interesting array of information to run the village.
Life in Summerford is good – while at first simply created as an outpost, the discovery of iron in the nearby renamed iron hills has seen the village grow and prosper, with the dominant local family even slowly gaining a chance to reach for nobility – at least in theory. In practice, unrest is brewing between the mine and the trading outpost of Summerford, for the mines have been besieged by kobold incursions and thus, tensions are slowly rising. 6 events and 3 sample NPCs add further color to the pdf.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to Raging Swan Press’ crisp, elegant two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked and in two versions – one optimized for screen-use and one to be printed. It should also be noted that DMs can download player-friendly versions of the map on Raging Swan Press’ homepage as a print-out/hand-out resource – which is plain awesome.
Author Alex Connell delivers the ascendant village to the descending Golden Valley – a mine on the rise instead of one on the decline and it per se is a nice village indeed, with quite some implied adventuring potential – including potential conflict between the old ways and the new as well as between miners and villagers. There’s quite an array of possibilities here. On the other hand, the village’s map isn’t as extremely evocative as some others in the series and the potential for conflict in the village itself is there, yes, but compared to other installments, it is a bit subdued. Now don’t get me wrong – this is me complaining at the highest level, but I still feel that some inkling, some more pronounced spark/threat for the powder’s keg that is adventuring, would have made this even better. Hence, I will remain with a final verdict of 4.5 stars, rounded down to 4 for the purpose of this platform.
Youc an get this nice village here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop.
Endzeitgeist out.
