Table of Contents - Mega Miniatures

BASICS – Freeport, The City of Adventure is a 150 page
hard-back book by Green Ronin publishing. It details a
city that can be used as the backdrop of adventures in
Dungeons and Dragons or another fantasy game. The
covers are full color and the binding feels very sturdy. The
interior art is all black & white with some of it great and
some of it ok, but all of it passable. The book will set you
back $29.95 USD.
BETWEEN THE COVERS – Inside you’ll find six chapters,
two appendices, a table of contents AND an index.
Having both of those just makes a GM’s job all the easier
when trying to find something. Chapter One gives a nicely
detailed history of how Freeport came to be and where it
is now. At seven pages it’s a rather quick, but interesting
read. Chapter Two goes into detail about the islands
close to Freeport and the sorts of trouble that your
characters can get into there. In Chapter One you learned
how the history of the rough and tumble city of Freeport.
Now in Chapters Three (The City of Freeport) and Four (A
Freeport Gazetteer) you get down to the business of
making a living (or killing) in the city. These chapters go
hand in hand with a beautiful map of the city. It’s four
folded panels in size and is at the back of the book. It’s
perforated for easy removal, but just take an extra minute
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when removing it from the rest of the book. It’s too nice to
tear up. Chapter five gives the GM many ways to run a
campaign in Freeport. Freeport is more than a bar-fight a
night place. Yes, it absolutely can be that if that’s what
you and your players want. You can hack-and-slash your
way through town if you like. But there’s also so much
more to Freeport. You could get into a heavy role-paying
(light on the combat) game where the players are
embroiled in all sorts of political games of cat and mouse.
A city this size would also work without a hitch for a
mystery game. Being a coastal city also opens up an
opportunity to get just about anywhere else in your
campaign world. The sixth chapter, new rules, is where
you’ll come across two new prestige classes (The
Freeport Pirate, different enough from the Dread Pirate in
Song and Silence to warrant its inclusion here, and the
Crimeboss), an NPC class (Cultist), new Feats (not just
centered on pirate-types, but quite useable for lots of
different characters), new Spells (lots that are water or
most useful to characters that spend a lot of time at sea),
and new Magic Items (like the spells, they are geared
towards sea-dogs, but you’ll find lots of very cool things
here).
The two appendices detail firearms, what true pirate would
be without one, and standard buildings that your
characters will wander into. The latter will save the GM
time in having to take care of sketching out each building
in the city, but the former should be looked over before
giving your players the ‘go-ahead’ to use them. Firearms
are brutal and can just lay waste to enemies. Doing so at
range makes them even more powerful. This is balanced
with major reload times and being rather expensive for
non-magical weapons.
VALUE – Ok, so should you shell out around $30 for
Freeport , The City of Adventure. Well, if you’re the
piratey type and want a cool place to send some scurvy
dogs down to Davey Jones’ locker then heck yeah. If
you’re more of a ‘classic’ fantasy player then this may not
float your boat. The only downside I noticed was that
there is a lot of gray coloring to the interior pages. In
some places this didn’t contrast very well with the black
text. Nothing was unreadable, but a lighter background
would have eliminated this entirely. As I said earlier, the
map is just gorgeous. Freeport is easily drop-able into
any fantasy campaign or you could even run a whole
campaign just in and around Freeport. There’s enough
going on here to keep your players busy and entertained.
www.greenronin.com