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Cities of Fantasy 1: The Gravediggers' Guild $2.50
Average Rating:3.0 / 5
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Cities of Fantasy 1: The Gravediggers\' Guild
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Cities of Fantasy 1: The Gravediggers' Guild
Publisher: RPG Objects
by Shane O. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 11/18/2008 21:11:54

Evil organizations aren’t a new staple in fantasy games. They’ve been around for a while, and we all know that they work very well. They fulfill the same function in your game that they do in narrative fiction. They’re basically an excuse to have multiple villains ready to stand against your heroes, which is the bare bones of a campaign right there. Need a new bad guy? No problem, The Evil Organization has yet another member! This first product in the Cities of Fantasy series introduces such an organization: The Gravedigger’s Guild. Let’s peel back the skin and see what this new group is all about.

A relatively brief product at fifteen pages in length, The Gravedigger’s Guild is about the organization of the same name. While ostensibly a charitable company dedicated to helping the deceased and the downtrodden, this is actually a front for a cult of the evil death god [insert name here]. The book goes over the cult in fair detail, describing their works (legitimate and otherwise), goals, organization, locations of activity, general appearance, what their magic is used for, initiation, slang, and more. The last few pages cover cemeteries in terms of what and who you’re likely to find there.

On the whole, the job that the book does covering the Guild isn’t a bad one…but I found myself less than impressed. The problem here isn’t what the book presents, but how it tries to present it. This is most clearly shown with the divide between fluff and crunch given here. This book clearly wants to be a universal supplement, but can’t seem to bring itself to fully slip away from its 3.5E d20 rules. Over 90% of the book is fluff text about the Guild, but it introduces two new skills and mentions various things that present modifiers to skill checks, as well as talking about d20 System spells (though there are no new spells or magic items here). I can understand why this was done, but it really seems to me that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It seems like d20 hold-outs will be unsatisfied with how little crunch there is in the book, while those who want it just for the fluff will find the repeated d20 statistics annoying.

Far more dichotomous, however, was the book’s treatment regarding the level of secrecy regarding the cult that the Guild front for. When describing it, the book’s presentation is that this cult is unknown to most members of the community, secretly manipulating things from behind the scenes. And yet, they have several hundred members in the average community (though it does say that these can be spread over a region), its membership garb is quite recognizable, and its tactics and initiation methods seem heavy-handed at best, and outrightly brazen at worst. If this cult is supposed to be a secret, it’s going to be a rather open one.

Ironically, the above disparity resolved itself for me when I realized I was looking at this book’s cult in the wrong light. This isn’t a group of unseen puppet-masters pulling a town’s strings; rather, it’s a radical organization of religious terrorists that have taken over a community. Seriously, that seems to fit much better with what the author has written here. This is a group that’s apparently taken over all affairs in an area by offering the carrot of free and low-cost infrastructures that range from extremely-important to vital, but also carries the stick of eliminating the (relatives of) people who speak out against their extremism, all of which lets them use the town as a base to carry out the dark goals of their organization. To put it another way, the Gravedigger’s Guild is the fantasy version of a small Syrian village that’s run by Hezbollah. This clearly wasn’t the author was trying to evoke, but it’s what honestly seems to work best here.

There were also some technical absences that I consider standard for a PDF product. While not vital in a book this short, bookmarks would have been helpful; really, every PDF should have those to make navigation as easy as possible, especially since that doubles as a table of contents (which this product didn’t have). Similarly, there was no printer-friendly version. Again, that’s not a big deal, but considering that there are several black and white illustrations, including a large page border on the left side of each page, it would have been nice.

Overall, this product wasn’t a bad resource, but it didn’t seem quite sure how to present itself. Some parts of the book, like the method of indoctrination into the cult, were great for providing vivid details that suggest adventure ideas. Others, like the two page listing of standard spells and magic items, each of which had a one-sentence description of what the Guild used them for, seemed less than inspired. It’s telling that the role I thought best fit the writing about the Guild isn’t what the author apparently intended. Still, the book did intrigue me in that regard, and that’s never a bad thing for an RPG product to do.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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