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apostrophen's review
3.0
I have to admit, I was expecting good things out of this book. The idea behind Cityscape was a good one - explore Dungeons and Dragons in an urban setting, with the hope of fleshing out how a city can be just as dangerous an experience as any dungeon, and bringing real life to the locations and options available for city-based play.
Beginning with descriptions of city by alignment, type, culture, and locations (which might have been too much example cities and not enough explanations or ideas on how to create your own), the book then moves into hazards (good), city districts (also good, and more useful than the blanket entire-city examples of the first thirty or so pages). The second chapter focuses on the player characters, and while there's discussion of all the characters, and some decent enough feats, it didn't seem like enough. Kudos, however, for including Warlock invocations.
Politics makes up a decent thirty page chunk thereafter with quite useful information, and events, encounters, monsters, and then a miscellany of various city bits and pieces rounds out the book. Prestige classes - always my favourite to read - are scattered among the pages of the book, with various houses or guilts, or organizations, which I found a little less than optimal, and there are not many of them.
This book is definitely weighted in the Dungeon Master's side, and I wouldn't recommend it for players to buy unless they occasionally DM as well.
Beginning with descriptions of city by alignment, type, culture, and locations (which might have been too much example cities and not enough explanations or ideas on how to create your own), the book then moves into hazards (good), city districts (also good, and more useful than the blanket entire-city examples of the first thirty or so pages). The second chapter focuses on the player characters, and while there's discussion of all the characters, and some decent enough feats, it didn't seem like enough. Kudos, however, for including Warlock invocations.
Politics makes up a decent thirty page chunk thereafter with quite useful information, and events, encounters, monsters, and then a miscellany of various city bits and pieces rounds out the book. Prestige classes - always my favourite to read - are scattered among the pages of the book, with various houses or guilts, or organizations, which I found a little less than optimal, and there are not many of them.
This book is definitely weighted in the Dungeon Master's side, and I wouldn't recommend it for players to buy unless they occasionally DM as well.
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