WOTC finally published an environment book that solves a long-standing problem for all DMs…cities. This Summer I reviewed two generic city sourcebooks but now there’s assistance on constructing one from scratch. A good chunk of it is derived from a free PDF WOTC posted after the 3.5 versions went on sale. The PDF was a quick generator that just covered the essentials by breaking it up into districts: a merchant district, a temple district, etc. Pretty effective too. The DM doesn’t have to obsess over every single building, shop, cart and resident, just the key element of the district. Cityscape expands upon this by including other critical details for fleshing out an urban setting: the prices on dwellings, wages for hirelings or skilled NPCs, taxes, government, law enforcement, the judicial system and many more matters that make the city plausible for D&D. Taxes? Sure, how else does a city pay its watch or dungsweeper guild. Judicial system? There’s a sore spot for my players since I stupidly ran two adventures pretty close together that had the heroes arrested by the villains to move the plot along. Not a problem now, there’s a guide on how the law usually works and it’s usually the city watch attacking first and asking questions later.
It wouldn’t be a WOTC sourcebook if it didn’t contain their usual new and extraneous prestige classes, spells, feats and monsters. There has also been this ugly trend of their books opening with crappy, uninteresting short stories. Those two pages could be put to better use with full-page illustrations or ads for other WOTC products. Fantasy novels are best written by authors with better track records. Thankfully the practical aspects received more pages than the stuff I consider over-specific junk. Practical examples: the peacebound and secret weapon spells are great. One keeps everybody in line when they have an audience with the king and the other would explain how an assassin gets around the guards’ frisking. My only complaint are the spells’ durations which makes them useless for long-term visitors. Junk examples: all the prestige classes and most of the books’ feats. None of my players are going to take Roofwalker and Roof-jumper due to most adventures taking place outside of cities. All the metamagic feats are borderline campaign-busters too.
A major benefit in Cityscape’s favor are the time-saving elements for the DM. There are the six example cities in the beginning, pre-made mundane NPCs (city watch, pickpockets, cultists, etc.), pre-made villains, sample organizations that can be incorporated (guilds, houses and temples) and most importantly, tables to randomly generate encounters, city events, tavern names and shopping sprees. The tavern section is my personal favorite because I get stumped on naming them unless they’re spelled out in the adventure. However, the players will love this section since it covers all the important things they tend to do: pick fights, gamble, perform for spare change, pick pockets and get drunk. Nightblade would be pleased.
The Bottom Line: It does weigh in a little light at 160 pages for $30 yet this sourcebook falls into the mandatory category unless you’re running an exotic campaign void of traditional D&D cities. Unlikely though. Cities are a fixture in fantasy literature, film and videogames. Historically they’re also the base of political power: from Paris to London to Tokyo to Tenochtitlan. There is some overlap from DMG II and PHB II but if you don’t have them, this is still very functional for the guilds and organizational benefits. I highly recommend Cityscape as a DM tool since it helps piece together an original city of your creation and it can tweak existing ones from other publishers.