I have just had my hardcopies of Empires of the Silk Road and City of the Crescent arrive a week ago. I went through the pdf of City a while back and found a big slab of inspiration. I like it a lot because it is a team from the region writing about their neighborhood and while it works with the 5e mechanics it takes a refreshingly original approach to presenting a setting book. It is up on Bundle of Holding (until 4/9/23) and at ~$6 a pdf, I think its pretty decent value and I'm all for supporting games studios in non-standard places.
Cover by Yağmur Kıyak
It is compatible with 5e but not in the typical 5e structure. The team writing it leaned hard into the lore, art and presentation and came up with a gorgeous book - with one caveat. The cover art above is iconic and probably the most gruesome thing about the book. To maintain harmony in my household I have had to wrap my own copy to hide it, but the rest of the interior is just gorgeous - different flower borders for every chapter, public domain art pieces for chapter breaks and lots of care and attention gone into the layout.
The really nice, crisp, clean feel to it which is especially impressive when you realise how dense this book is. There is a huge amount of material crammed in here which might not suit everyone - this is not a skim-and-go supplement.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
A page of Introduction
A page of Soundtracks
34 pages in Chapter I: Historica Arcanum
82 pages of Character Creation
244 pages in Chapter III: The City Of Crescent
24 pages of an Alternate History Toolbox
8 pages in Chapter V: Cookbook
6 pages Chapter VI: Appendix
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
The first block is the set up - Introduction (1 page), Soundtracks (1 page), Origin Of Magic (4 pages), Mythologia Arcanum (6 pages) and Running A Story In Istanbul (22 pages). I would also include the Foreword (1 page) before the contents as helpful in framing the whole setting up. There is a lot of system agnostic setting meat in here - soundtrack suggestions, recommended reading, a take on magic, a take on origins of the traditional D&D races. These are mostly the 'adaptor' to catch the elements of the 5e PHB and prepare them to slot into Istanbul as depicted in this book.
Running Istanbul contains lots of sets of information that address different topics - common words, notable historical events, titles, names, views of magic that allow a sprinkling of flavour to be laid over your game. The real meat is in the 'People of Istanbul' section where we get the cultural concepts of 'Mahalle' (~neighbourhood), traditions of interaction with the nobility, bathhouse culture, how the social classes act and what types of foreigners there could be. A great table expands on chase rules for rooftops, underground or by carriage. Appropriate equipment rounds out the section.
In Chapter II: Character Creation we get all the 5e character building crunch - Character Creation (3 pages), Spells & Items (10 pages), Spell Rebound Table (6 pages), Subclass Options (16 pages), Feats (2 pages), Profession System (42 pages). Character Creation, Spells & Items, Subclass Options and Feats are appropriate to the setting - how classes would slot in, flavourful subclasses, items and feats that fit the setting - all great, atmospheric stuff.
The Spell Rebound table is our first block of new mechanics; essentially you can cast spells so that the cumulative spell-levels equal your character level (Defiance rating) then after that you are accumulating 'Threshold level' at one per spell-level cast. Each time you cast while you have 'Threshold level' you save against some sort of grim effect until you purge your 'Threshold' with a long rest. Likely to make rapid-fire magic use pretty hazardous.
Our second block of mechanics, the profession system is interesting - you get Profession Experience (PEX) for achieving profession specific goals (e.g. bounty hunter turns in bounties) and you cash in those PEX for advances. It looks to me like a parallel character level up and my initial read is players could get pretty chunky if they are cranking up in PEX but that is moderated by there being lots of neat, low cost advances that will tempt most folk before the save up the PEX to go for one of the really chunky expensive ones. The professions come with their own downtime activities and a Magnum Opus quest the DM can dice up to unlock a great reward at the end. Besides the bounty hunter, professions include the burglar, the alchemist, the antiquarian, the archaeologist and the spy.
Chapter III: The City Of Crescent gives us Locations (22 pages), Timeline (2 pages), Synopsis Of The Whole Story (4 pages), Characters (40 pages), The Dreams (10 pages), Act One - The First Crescent (24 pages), Act Two - The Second Crescent (22 pages), Act Three - The Third Crescent (28 pages), Act Four - The Lunar Eclipse (16 pages), Side Quests (20 pages), The Wonders Of Creatures And The Marvels Of The Universe (54 pages)
Core of the book is an ~19th century adventure, very NPC plot heavy, not so combat focussed/dungeoneering. A key insight is actually up in the Foreword where it says "We also wanted to bring a new kind of narrative to 5th edition [...] we wanted to concentrate on our characters and let them guide their own stories organicaly." - something I am very glad I did not miss by skipping the Foreword. We start off arriving into Istanbul on a ship which is suddenly engulfed in a dramatic heist. Once in the city, the party is roped into recovering what was stolen.
The adventure itself is interestingly structured - with core chunks of the main adventure, a menu of side quests and atmosphere-setting almost cut-scenes that mix or get triggered once a number of quests or a particular quest occurs. The 21 side-quests are split out by quest-giver and helpfully tagged with some descriptors (action, exploration), level and the profession that best matches this sidequest. I like this format a lot, giving lots of scope for the players to chart their own path during the 'free play' blocks of the adventure. As events begin to accelerate, the players find themselves sucked up into high politics with lots of branching alternatives depending on who they support and who lives and dies on the way.
Supporting the adventure proper we get the districts - the Undercity, Pera District, Grand Bazaar, Imperial Peninsula, Kasimpasha District - giving a social rang from top to bottom. Then the Timeline and Synopsis give an overview of the four acts of the story and Dreams give us a block of prophetic dreams to drop during long rests. Characters gives us 14 major NPCs in a quasi-bestiary format and Wonders Of Creatures And The Marvels Of The Universe is a classic bestiary of things and people you can run into in the city; ranging from various types of minor NPC through to soul-collectors, dragons and 'The Stealer of Faces'.
Chapter IV: Alternate History Toolbox (22 pages) is a workflow on worldbuilding, named 'how to do alternate history' but in practice a good set of questions for creating the world for any campaign to figure out how it works and in praticular the fantastic elements of how magic interacts and influences the setting, how non-humans interact, etc. We get a worked example of 13th century Baghdad under threat from the Mongol hordes.
Chapter V: Cookbook (6 pages) - here you get 13 recipes, none of which I have tried but they look tasty. I appreciated the stat ratings, alignments and challenge ratings for each recipe. As an idea for those with time and hosting space, certainly having setting appropriate snacks will help with game atmosphere.
Chapter VI: Appendix gives us a page each on The Lies We Told - artistic license taken - and Historical Reading before closing with Open Game License and Thanks. The Lies We Told is a nice piece of 'designer notes' here calling out the bending and stretching of real-world timelines to have certain people in the same place at the same time. This and the Appendix N-like Historical Reading are great breadcrumbs for GMs who might want to read in more on the setting.
Wrap up - I picked this up on the impetus of supporting Eurasian TTRPG houses, especially locals talking about their neighbourhoods. I have not been disappointed and I am very pleased to see the Metis Creative cranking out more material to follow this. There is lots of setting information, tons of flavour and an innovative quasi-open structure adventure in here to either use directly or be inspired by. There is a lot in here to read and I think doing the adventure its full justice would require a good sit with this book and a bunch of notes since there is such a lot packed in here that it would be a shame to miss anything. I like this a lot, check them out on Bundle of Holding.
No comments:
Post a Comment