It's nice to be able to speak from a position of authority now and again. Since before 3rd Edition came out, I've been running an all-urban campaign, set in the city of Ptolus. You can read about it here, although you'll want to check out the archives as well if it's interesting to you. In any event, I guess this makes me at least fairly knowledgeable about city adventuring, the topic covered by a recent addition to Fantasy Flight's "Legends & Lairs" series of d20 books called City Works. So, as I looked at City Works, I did so from two different standpoints: Does the material and advice jive with my own almost four years of experience in running city adventures with 3rd Edition, and does it offer me anything I can use -- anything I didn't already have or know. A tall, perhaps even unfair order, but City Works succeeds on both counts nonetheless.

You can look back through my reviews and see that I don't usually write "book report" reviews: reviews that are simply an overview of the book's contents with an opinion at the end. I focus on my analysis and conclusions drawn from the book and let the company who publishes it give you the sales copy. My method of reviewing, however, sometimes leaves me with little to say, when my opinion is as simple as, "This is a good book." With City Works, I'd say that unless your campaign is devoid of cities (or you only use cities to restock supplies and sell loot), you won't be sorry you bought this book.

To get into real analysis, I have get into very specific points because the book simply succeeds on all the large issues. It offers some valuable material for players (focused pretty seriously on a largely urban game), then concentrates on material for DMs: designing cities, populating them, designing urban adventures, and running games in cities. This last part was of particular interest to me, because it covers handling city settings, like chases through crowds, adventuring on rooftops, exploring the sewers, and so on. It also offers some useful advice and mechanics for hazards in a city environment, like tavern brawls, fire, riots, sieges, and so on. This is probably the best part of the book.

But let's get to those aforementioned specifics. The first part of the book, full of (the requisite) classes, prestige classes, feats, and spells, leaves me with some mixed reactions. On the one hand, some of this material is pretty neat. The acrobat class, for example, is pretty cool if terribly specific for a core class. The feats are interesting, as are the spells, many of which require a special urbanmancer feat to acquire them. I'll definitely use some of these in my campaign -- in particular I have some players who might like the Innocent Smile (allows you to get people to ignore what they've just seen) and Man About Town (you've got friends everywhere) feats. On the other hand, this section of the book showed a real lack of editing (both the rogue and the bard are called "the ultimate urban class" in the first sentence of their descriptions). Some of the material seemed rather needless, in the book only because the book needed some "crunchy" bits. I see little need, for example, for the pit fighter class, or the Kingpin prestige class.

(As an aside, I am getting pickier in my old age about prestige classes and the hooks upon which they are hung -- I'm harsher on those that you really could create, either mechanically or flavor-wise, already. A year ago, I wouldn't have judged these prestige classes nearly so ruthlessly.)

Perhaps this comes down to the "Legend & Lairs" series as a whole, rather than this book. Isn't it possible to put out a book like this with advice and flavor, without the PC creation bits? Perhaps it is an even more endemic problem, going across company lines. This seems the most likely. Writing PC bits is an industry-wide virus, and my own Malhavoc Press has not been immune. But now I'm looking at you, consumers -- would you buy this book without them? I hope so. When I look at something like City Works, the even better Traps and Treachery, or some of the other excellent books by Fantasy Flight, I feel like I'm looking at authors and editors with their hands tied. "We'd like to be putting out flavorful books on various topics, but people just want feats and prestige classes." It's as though "crunchy bits" have become the gratuitous R-rated movie nude scene. You want to put out a useful, artful product, but there's the common perception that, if you don't stick in a little gratuitous content, no one's going to pay any attention. Maybe the perception is correct. I don't know.

Right or wrong, however, City Works pays its crunchy bit dues, and to its credit, I'd use half the classes and most of the feats and spells. To get very specific with the acrobat, it seemed odd that the class doesn't get evasion until 4th level. While the author might feel (and might be right) that evasion at an earlier level is too good for any class, I know I'd feel cheated playing a 3rd-level acrobat when my 3rd-level rogue friend is better at leaping out of the way of danger than I am. It also struck me that the urbanmancy spells, while cool, are too few in number and too rarely applicable to be worth a feat. Minor quibbles, and -- to be frank -- the rules material in this chapter was not what drew me to the book anyway.

The heart of the book, as I said before, deals with the things a DM needs to understand to create and run a city and set adventures there. This part of the book is good from beginning to end. It runs the gamut from material that a novice DM needs to know about what the players will want to do in a city and how to deal with it, to more advanced material on setting up factions within the city, and planning how different types of cities will react to various situations (like crimes). It's thoughtful, well-developed material, and I recommend that every DM read it.

The only thing I wished for was even more concrete examples. The basics of a few cities of different sizes, more maps, and more attention to the stranger stuff (floating cities, underwater cities, and so on -- although to its credit, the book does briefly discuss subterranean cities) would have made this book sparkle like a diamond.

The last portion of the book is a lot of tables for randomly generating NPCs, urban encounters, street names, and so forth. These are valuable, but if you've got a book like AEG's Toolbox, there's little here that you can't get in greater detail there. I'm not against random tables -- I often find such things to be useful idea generators -- but this section seemed underdeveloped.

In conclusion, City Works is good where it matters. The main portion of the book is informative, helpful, well written, and well organized. If you want a book to help you become a better urban DM, this one is for you. If you're a player in a heavily urban campaign, you might want to check out the book and consider buying it. And you should read the DM-tailored parts as well, to get a new perspective on your character's environment.

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