I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.
Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.
So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Introduction -this opens with a description of the campaign intended for this book - an open ended sandbox in the city and its surrounds. Tips on the nuts and bolts of running everything are provided - which adventures protential impact others, suggestions on how to handle time management, where to download a player map - which are useful. We get a bit of the history and the daily cycle of life in the city, then a map with a high-level key followed by detail on all of those locations - setting the pattern for the rest of the sections. Some historical context for Alexandria is provided, enough to work with, on par with any fantasy city description. You could easily flesh this out with any other readings from the era if you wanted to go deeper and there is plenty of room for you to drop in whatever you need for your old campaign. Barring the most frenetically active and ruthlessly task-oriented players, there is content enough here to keep you busy for a good long while.
We get a city map and a description of about three dozen locations, with some expanded upon in the adventures or linking to the catacombs below. At this level we get a fair few 'single-use' encounters - groups and locations that are merchants, informers, guards and other players within Alexandria for players to run into. We get more detail on the factions in the appendix and on some of the locations in the adventures but at this city level we get all the other things that make the city live and breath.
We also get our first look at Mumia, the drug made from ground-up mummies that has amphetamine-like properties and is a driver of a chunk of the main adventure arc in the background. Outsiders, both sides of the war raging in Europe, have come seeking Mumia for their armies and this demand has set many other dominoes falling which drives many of the adventures as factions via to capture these spoils.
The Adventures are five adventures which each are good 'archetypes' - a raid of an abandoned tower, a dungeon crawl/heist, a social-sneaking escapade, a fantastic manor raid and another dungeon crawl with faction-scale implications.
Each of the adventures is a site with a handful of adventure hooks to get the players to poke at it - what the players should be doing at each site will vary. They are all very grounded spaces - tombs and dwellings - where some rooms are just latrines or pantries and the sneaking through quiet empty spaces to find the true points of interest is to be expected. Each site has a map and key on the facing page so you can track overall progress - here each room is given just a name and one line, with the detail in the section after.
We get the detail in the same format throughout for locations and the catacombs - a few bullet points of the obvious features with an elements of interest bolded. These bullet points are lean enough that you can quickly read them without delaying the game but they give you enough to run the room. The bolded elements are expanded below the bullet points - whether a description of a trap, treasure or monster. It makes for a good navigable-at-table reference - monster stats are in the compact Lamentations/BX format, everything is right there as you need it.
The adventures each bring to life one of the factions in play in the city - often with one or more of the others being the instigator or forming a motivating force. Reading through front to back, quite a lot of the setting becomes revealed in asides about this or that character or location. The presence of the hyena cult becomes apparenty when a guest at a ball is described as a member for example. I have not yet gotten all the adventures to table but they read as useable both standalone and as a thread of connection. A stolen caravan of mummies provides the major mcguffin for the pushing-and-pulling between the factions as the current raises on Alexandria.
The Dungeon - the catacombs beneath Alexandria detailing the eight levels, each with their own occupants and hazards. Most of the adventures have a link to - or are placed within - some section of the catacombs. Here again, each level opens with a description of the differentiating aspects for that level - the tomb of the dogs, sanctuary of bastet, cultists hideout, etc. Then we get our double-page spread with the level and the one-line room key, then the rest of the level behind. With eight levels over eighty-odd pages, we get over 140 rooms spread throughout the levels. All together it makes a lot of material, enough to sustain plenty of wandering around in this evocative dungeon.
Appendices provide more 'general' info on factions, d20 rumours, encounters (d20 each day and night) and items which altogether could also have been reasonably called a 'city' section. These are all the things that are not specifically tied to a single location. Hooks to sites, factions and parts of the adventures are shot through these tables making them very useful to get things started but also to bring ignored or obscure threads to the players attention.
To wrap up - I really like this as a great example of a grounded dungeon - the catacombs feel real, mostly empty, long-ago looted in many places, with the hazards and inhabitants most often being the factions and fortune-seekers from the city above pursuing their own goals down here. I think this is a good study for how a few supernatural elements plus a lot of natural entropy give you a risky but rewarding feeling dungeon crawl.
The city fits nicely to my sense of what is useful at table - not too much detail to render it unwieldy but enough to make it distinct. While I have yet to bring it to table in a full throated city-crawl it feels like the right blend of useable detail. The city map, encounter tables and rumours will get book-marked.
The thing Hyena Child does that other city books often fail at is to make the city feel living - factions are in action, they have plans that manifest as adventures which are here in the book - and those tie to the rumour table, to the street encounters, to things you can stumble across in the dungeon. There are enough factions to make it feel deep but few enough central concerns - the Mumia trade being the core one - that it feels manageable. Reading through it the city locations became alive as we learned of the factions using them, excataving them or staking them out. The factions were enhanced by the adventures that had engaged the players in those plots and schemes. The sections reinforce one another in a way that feels like packing down gunpowder where others have sometimes felt like dumping a box of mice on the floor where it becomes a challenge to keep track of it all.
Further while this is historical Alexandria, this could be easily repainted as your port city of choice without a heartbreaking amount of effort.
Very pleased I grabbed this, well worth it.
For other reviews see Age of Dusk, dnalorsblog or Ten Foot Pole.
Thanks for the thoughtful review! Was nice to meet you at the Vienna Indie RPG Con.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Markus