Cityscape

review by Spriggan

Overall score:

I’ll tell you a dirty little secret: deep down I’ve always wanted to run a campaign with a single city setting and no generic dungeon delving to clear out Orcs, having random peasants running up to you begging you to save their town from an animated pile of gold with orphans sticking out of it, and no having to worry about travel time and constraints and then deciding to ignore it all since it’s more of a hassle than it’s worth. There’s a lot of possibility in cities, both roleplaying-wise and adventure-wise, and it presents players with new ways of dealing with situations, since you can’t just fireball everything around you. Cityscape tries to bring these concepts to a GM; I say tries because it gets lost around page one and doesn’t find itself again until around page 130. The other problem with the book is that it recycles from Sharn; actually most of the content worth reading is straight out of Sharn, but sanitized for the non-Eberron setting.

But let's not get too ahead of ourselves here.

Any RPG book that starts out with short fiction automatically sends up red flags because all RPG book fiction is bad. The D&D writers are the worst offenders since it seams like they’re using the RPG to vault themselves to novel writing and they end up focusing on the wrong thing so the product suffers. Let's be honest here, there’s a reason that most people don’t write fiction for Wizards because they don’t have the talent for it and adding this stuff to RPG books just reinforces what everyone already knows and makes it look like the RPG department is the fiction reject pile, which it’s not. But yet some RPG designers keep trying to make it that, and most of their RPG books aren’t well written because it’s not what they want to be doing.

As a reviewer I like to try and give the author the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a lot of things, especially word usage and the flow of the book. I read through it first then try and refine things while writing a review so I can see how well the book works in a game situation in which a GM needs to find things. Usually if a book does one well it does the other poorly. It’s just how people write either for ease of reading or ease of searchability, and sometimes a book gets both right, but this book gets both wrong: horribly wrong. You don’t need to look farther then the first chapter to tell how little effort was put into this book’s origination. First off the title is “The Scope of the City” and as someone who works on projects a lot and does some project management I know what a scope is, it’s defining what your project is and isn’t and prioritizes objectives, but apparently no one working on this book does--or cares.

So that can be applied to a chapter about creating a city easily, and it starts that way and lasts about half a page where it turns from how to create a city--in which it doesn’t even mention anything about using the DMG for anything, even though they add one new rule to “here are my cool cities I created for my RPG setting that my cool intro story takes place in and did I mention I made them myself?” to “Here’s all the cool stuff from the Sharn book” to “Here’s where we don’t bother to explain anything and instead tell you to buy the Races of X Books”.

The flow of the chapters don’t make a lot of sense since things that probably shouldn’t be grouped together are. Then randomly throughout the book sidebars are added to offer rules for various things like getting help from a scholar, getting into drinking contests, and sightseeing in cities, and then random prestige classes that don’t add anything.

The sadist thing about Cityscape is there’s a lot of potential here. There are some cool feats (like being able to change the source of a spell), some cool monsters and encounters (like magical pollution). At some point someone was on the right path with the last chapter “Running a City” because it has some good ideas for the first page or two, but instead of extending some effort they simply rip off Sharn (the city area descriptions) for half the book, fill up the first part with city map descriptions that are more about creating a setting than being useful to the game, and then filling the rest with a paragraph here or there on what a mayor or a sheriff is or that cloud cities are cool or you could put your city on a cliff. Instead they could have presented us with why using a mayor is a good idea over a council or vice-versa, given some examples on how to incorporate each entity in a city into an adventure, but it’s all about the 'What' in this book instead of the 'Why' and the 'What' isn’t even that informative.

It upsets me to see Wizards take something that should have been a good book and use it to recycle content from a good book, Sharn, that some people might not have bought because it was setting specific. There are good things about Cityscape, but even with those there’s no way I could recommend this book over its source material--which is a better book--and even if I think it was a decent book youshould ask yourself if you should buy it just out of principle. Hopefully this wasn’t scraping the barrel on Wizard’s part; they put out a lot of books a year and not all can be great, but when something this bad comes out not long after another horrible book that has many of the same faults one can’t help but feel that way.

Discuss it in our forums.

Buy Cityscape at Amazon

Written by Spriggan on January 16th, 2007